If you are wondering why Twitter is down this morning, because you are an addict like me, here is the explanation, directly from Twitter:
“Denial of Service Attack
On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.”
I am also hearing that Facebook is majorly slow as well. But is that anything new?
So hang in there, I’m sure you’ll be tweetin’ before you know it!
By the way, are you following me?
These attacks will actually not stop. Russian PMC Alfa-Tsentr ( link removed by admin ) is responsible for coordinating both these current spam and July botnet attacks. At least on the first spate of attacks, they likely worked on behalf of the KFA (North Korea). The bulk of yesterday and today’s incoming connections (spam attack) terminating within our secure clusters originated from IPs in Russia and China. During the first attack there were several bounced undeliverable messages from the Russian company which referenced both the KFA and the North Korean foreign ministry. I looked up their originating IP addresses and they turned out to belong to a Chinese host that is used by several North Korean sites including the KCNA (Korean Central news Agency). I know this because I am a sysadmin (basically an oncall tech) at a large US data center. I have sever logs, e-mails, and even telephone numbers for these people and only 1 of 7 journalists I contacted bothered to return my message. Welcome to the information age.