A Twitter attack mystery

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of the beginning of a five-day war between Georgia and Russia over the disputed South Ossetia region. Though the conflict was short-lived, thousands on both sides are still displaced and an online attack that took down Twitter yesterday shows that tensions may still be high.

Twitter was out of service for around two hours yesterday after a denial-of-service attack, which overwhelms a site with junk requests, targeted the site, along with Google, Facebook and LiveJournal.com. The BBC reported today that Facebook officials said the attack was aimed at one person, a pro-Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu. According to the BBC, the blogger told an interviewer from the UK’s Guardian newspaper that he is “certain the order came from the Russian government.” Cyxymu has criticized Russian conduct during the war over South Ossetia on his blog and believes he is being targeted because of that.

A New York Times article focusing on Twitter’s temporary service outage did not include reports that the attack was aimed at one person but did hint at the connection with the Georgia-Russia conflict. Bill Woodcock, research director of Packet Clearing House, was quoted in the article saying that he had found evidence that the attack originated from the Abkhazia region, a disputed territory between Russia and Georgia like South Ossetia.

The different accounts reported in both articles show that nothing is certain in this case. The BBC said the attack was perpetrated by a botnet – a network of computers used by hackers – while the New York Times said it definitely was not a botnet. It seems that it’s too early to tell who initiated the attack and why. But if Cyxymu is right and the Russia government is resorting to viral warfare to silence one blogger, that’s a menacing though.