The success and failure of a Twitter attack

The denial-of-service attacks that shut down Twitter for a few hours last week, said Byron Acohido in USA Today, showed just how vulnerable social networks are to assaults by hackers. The attacks—which also disrupted Facebook and LiveJournal—were meant to silence Cyxymu, "a small-time blogger espousing anti-Russian sentiments," but the "collateral damage" was felt around the world.

And the nightmare isn't completely over, said Techtree. Twitter hasn't felt the same since the denial-of-service bombardment targeting the blogger Cyxymu, from Tbilisi, Georgia. Many users complained over the weekend that the site was still "extremely slow," and people who access Twitter using third-party tools were having extra trouble posting and reading tweets.

The irony is that this "massive cyber attack" blew up in the face of whoever was behind it, said David Colker in the Los Angeles Times. The aim was to silence the blogger known as Cyxymu—but by taking down Twitter the attackers made their foe a "global celebrity." As Cyxymu put it, "I am not happy that (my) blogs were attacked," said the blogger, who revealed that his first name is Giorgy, "but it is good that I get famous."

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