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Twitter Isn't an Obvious Target
Twitter was down this morning, the victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack . The silence was deafening.
A plain DoS involves an effort to flood a site or network with so much traffic that it can't be reached or servers or routers crash under the load; crashing systems is typically much more difficult these days than a few years ago.
A distributed DoS relies on botnets, armies of compromised PCs that can be remotely activated to perform actions, such as flooding a network with requests, sending spam, or attacking other computers to install viruses.
Twitter isn't an obvious target, because DDoS attacks are typically used as either part of a blackmail effort - "pay us $200,000 or we'll ruin your service" —or as a way to batter down machines enough that systems fail and private information, such as poorly secured credit card data or personal information can be extracted.
A plain DoS involves an effort to flood a site or network with so much traffic that it can't be reached or servers or routers crash under the load; crashing systems is typically much more difficult these days than a few years ago.
A distributed DoS relies on botnets, armies of compromised PCs that can be remotely activated to perform actions, such as flooding a network with requests, sending spam, or attacking other computers to install viruses.
Twitter isn't an obvious target, because DDoS attacks are typically used as either part of a blackmail effort - "pay us $200,000 or we'll ruin your service" —or as a way to batter down machines enough that systems fail and private information, such as poorly secured credit card data or personal information can be extracted.
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