DoS Cyber Attack Takes Twitter Offline

Attacks on the social networking site Twitter Thursday morning left many users unable to access and update their status.

Twitter was back up by mid-day and it was reported that the attacks had originated either from Russia or the former Soviet republic Georgia.

Twitter confirmed the outage was linked to malicious attackers in a brief status message posted around 11:00 a.m EST.

We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend and recover from this attack.

Facebook experienced problems for part of the day, but it was unknown if they were the result of this attack.

References:

Source: http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=6922
Source: http://status.twitter.com/post/157191978/ongoing-denial-of-service-attack
Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3953
Source: http://www.courant.com/business/hc-twitter0807.artaug07,0,4042649.story