This is not the first time we all have faced Twitter outage. We have seen it quite a sometimes Twitter custom error page and most of the time it is due to over congestion of traffic- more than what is expected or planned for.
But this morning Twitter was hit with Distributed Denial of Service Attack or DDoS. Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon and other highly popular sites have faced this earlier and this time it is the most popular micro blogging platform Twitter.
What is DDoS?
A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users.
Though the means to carry out and target for DDoS attack may vary but the intention of DDoS attack is to prevent an internet site or service to operate efficiently either temporarily or indefinitely.
A distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) occurs when multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually one or more web servers. These systems are compromised by attackers using a variety of methods.
Attackers have been known to use the following 4 programs to launch DDoS attacks: Trinoo, TFN, TFN2K and Stacheldraht
History of DDos
The first well-publicized DDoS attack in the public press was in February 2000. On February 7, Yahoo! was the victim of a DDoS during which its Internet portal was inaccessible for three hours. On February 8, Amazon, Buy.com, CNN, and eBay were all hit by DDoS attacks that caused them to either stop functioning completely or slowed them down significantly.
Analysts estimated that during the three hours Yahoo was down, it suffered a loss of e-commerce and advertising revenue that amounted to about $500,000. According to book seller Amazon.com, its widely publicized attack resulted in a loss of $600,000 during the 10 hours it was down.
Denial-of-service attacks and the law
In the Police and Justice Act 2006, the United Kingdom specifically outlawed denial-of-service attacks and set a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
