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Update: Twitter still struggling to recover from DDoS attack

By Juan Carlos Perez
August 7, 2009 04:12 PM ET

IDG News Service - The DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack that crippled Twitter on Thursday is still affecting the micro-blogging service on Friday, the company said in a blog post.

Specifically, Twitter has had to take defensive actions that are preventing some third-party Twitter applications from communicating with the company's API (application programming interface).

In addition, many users can't post Twitter messages via SMS (Short Message Service), as Twitter continues to defend itself against the attack, which the company described as "ongoing" in the blog.

"Due to defensive measures we’ve taken against the ongoing denial-of-service attack, some Twitter clients are unable to communicate with our API, and many users are unable to tweet via SMS," reads the blog post. "We are working as quickly as possible to restore our full service."

In another update posted later at around 2 p.m. ET on Friday, this time in the company's main blog, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone called the situation an "adventure" and said the company has faced a variety of attacks over the past 24 hours that change "in nature and intensity."

Stone also reiterated that the attack is ongoing, but that no data or personal information "of any kind" has been compromised.

The company is still working to restore access to third-party Twitter applications affected by the "defensive measures" taken by the company, which Stone acknowledged resulted in "overcompensation on our part." He didn't mention whether the problem with posting via SMS has been resolved.

"Denial of Service attacks are a known quantity on the web and they are not going away any time soon. Nevertheless, we can and will improve system response to these assaults such that they don't interfere with our normal, everyday Twittering," Stone wrote.

The DDoS attack hit several sites, including LiveJournal and Facebook, but Twitter has been by far the most affected, as it went offline for hours on Thursday.

As speculation brewed over who is responsible for the attack, a blogger from the country of Georgia blamed Russia for it, saying it's an attempt to silence him, according to a report on Friday in The Guardian.

The blogger, identified as Cyxymu, told the Guardian that he believes the Kremlin was behind the attack because he has been critical of Russia's policies and actions towards Georgia, specifically regarding the military conflict over the South Ossetia region.

"Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I'm certain the order came from the Russian government," the blogger told The Guardian. "An attack on such a scale that affected three worldwide services with numerous servers could only be organized by someone with huge resources."

The blogger, who told the newspaper that his first name is Georgy and that he is a 34-year-old economics lecturer, said that the hackers sent hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages, falsely saying they came from him and asking recipients to visit his pages on Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook.

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2010 International Data Group. All rights reserved.
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