As you may or may not know, popular social networking site Twitter was down for several hours on Thursday. The Winnipeg Free Press website took a lot of heat in their comments section for even reporting that it was down. Heck, even CTV National News reported on it.
Twitter was the unfortunate victim of a denial of service (DoS) attack, which essentially sends automated requests to the server over and over again until it can’t handle it anymore and shuts down. The effects are not permanent or damaging, but it does cause the site to temporarily go offline.
Facebook was also a victim of the attack, but not to the point where it went offline, it only lagged a bit.
So, why were Twitter and Facebook targeted? Who knows. The fact is, sending out a DoS attack is a federal offense that can land you behind bars. The FBI investigates these types of cyber attacks on a daily basis and you can bet they were called in after yesterday.
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