Update from the broken interwebs

I originally put this as an update from my previous post, but then I figured that it would be better just to post it on its own.

It all seems to be a direct attack on a single user of both services (Wired):

CNet, citing Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, says this attack is personal, and political: it is reporting that the motive was to silence a single person — a Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google’s Blogger and YouTube — as part of the continuin Russia/Georgia conflict.

Little of the investigation has been revealed, but in a status update late Thursday Twitter founder Biz Stone seemed to agree that there was a single perpetrator at least on his site:

Over the last few hours, Twitter has been working closely with other companies and services affected by what appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack. As to the motivation behind this event, we prefer not to speculate. […]

We’ve worked hard to achieve technical stability and we’re proud of our Engineering and Operations teams. Nevertheless, today’s massive, globally distributed attack was a reminder that there’s still lots of work ahead.

The Guardian has some more info on this as well:

The Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu, who was yesterday the victim of a cyber assault that affected hundreds of millions of web users around the world, has blamed the attack on the Kremlin.

Speaking to the Guardian from an office in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, he said he believed the denial-of-service strike that hit LiveJournal, Facebook and Twitter stemmed from an attempt to silence his criticism over Russia’s conduct in the war over the disputed South Ossetia region, which began a year ago today.

“Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I’m certain the order came from the Russian government,” said the blogger, whose monicker is a latinised version of the Russian spelling of Sukhumi, the capital of Georgia’s other breakaway republic, Abkhazia.

He added: “An attack on such a scale that affected three worldwide services with numerous servers could only be organised by someone with huge resources.”

So in the end it seems that my musings yesterday were on the right track.

This story keeps growing:

Cyxymu might be considered the first “digital refugee“.