Twitter recovering from a Denial of Service Attack

Twitter sometimes goes down due to overloading, but this time it was much more serious – the Twitter status page shows how the company was subjected to a severe denial of service attack.

Apart from the obvious hassle this will have caused many users, what are the possible outcomes of this so-called ‘DoS’ & should we be worried?

In short, the Twitter Technical Team – aka T³ (I admit, I just made that up 🙂 ) will obviously be working hard on how to prevent this in the future.

But why do ‘hackers’ (or ‘crackers’ as they should be correctly termed) do this kind of thing?

Well, there are as many reasons as days in the year, but one of the primary ones might be to see if they can hold Twitter to randsom – ie ‘Pay us $100,000USD or we’ll take you down again’ kind of thing.

Or, it might be they just want to be able to go higher up in the hacker rankings:

“Hey, were you the guy who brought Twitter down? Hey, quDoS to yer man…”

Whatever the case, it’s a jolt of a reminder for all us Twitter-ites (or Tweeterholics) not to become reliant on Twitter as our primary method of communicating with one or another.

There’s always the phone. Or even…face to face 🙂