A blogger who has been slammed for the attacks against Twitter and Facebook has told the BBC that he blames Russia for the assault. Known more famously by his net name "Cyxymu", the alleged cyber antagonist says he has been targeted for "telling the truth about the Russian-Georgian war" in his writings on the internet.
"I write the truth about the Russian-Georgian war and somebody did not like these truths - these people in Russia," the blogger told BBC News. Known by his Mum and Dad as Gregory, the blogger is famous for posting videos and blogs which criticize Russia over its conduct in the war over the South Ossetia. These begun a year or so ago.
In an attempt to seemingly wipe any trace of this blogger, though more importantly, his work from the internet, a trio of popular social networking websites (of which he is a member) suffered a crippling DoS (Denial of Service) attack. DoS attacks take various forms but often involve a company"s servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them. According to a spokesperson who spoke to the BBC, a botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users. This crippling act resulted in the social networking website Twitter to be down for around two hours on Thursday. Facebook also commented upon its service being "degraded" during the attack. Only Google seems to have come out of the attack relatively unscathed.
Facebook did shed a little more light on the situation by clarifying that the attacks were as a result of an attack upon an individual member of certain sites, rather than upon the sites themselves.
Security analyst Graham Cluley, of security firm Sophos, told BBC News there was no suggestion the attack against the blogger was state-endorsed by the Russian Government.
"It was almost certainly an individual who took objection to his blogs...they took internet vigilantism into their own hands to try to blast him off the web, but in the process blasted Twitter off instead."
It seems a while ago now since Twitter suffered an "Denial of Service" however other websites other than this and Facebook have also been affected. Although there has been no information made official by Google, it seems that Google"s email service "GMail" was under attack along with the video blogging/posting website "YouTube." Companies affected have been keen to stress to their more regular users that no personal data stored upon the systems has been affected and that everything is where it should be post-attack.