Twitter, Facebook DDoS Attack Targeted One User

An anonymous reader writes "A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to yesterday's site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on, according to a Facebook executive. The blogger, who uses the account name 'Cyxymu' (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia), had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNet News." Here are user Cyxymu's LiveJournal Google cache and LiveJournal account (unreachable at this writing). Larry Magid writes on CNet that this individual blogs about independence of a breakaway region of Georgia. Macworld has some speculation in other directions on the motivations behind the DDoS attack.
Update: 08/07 19:52 GMT by KD : Cyber attacks on Cyxymu are not new. For over a year Evgeny Morozov has been calling attention to him as the first digital refugee.

Next time it's me

[Toe, The]

So if you ever hear of a simultaneous attack on SlashDot and Twitter... that's aimed at me. See, I have accounts on both sites, so clearly...

What a country!

[Teresita]

Here in capitalist America whole country use Twitter to get informed. In Soviet Russia, Twitter shut down whole country to get informer!

This is awsome...

[ComputerGeek01]

So immediatly following a true DDoS attack on these sites you provide links to them so that they can then be \.'d this...is...awsome.

Re:Asymmetrical warfare

[oenone.ablaze]

perhaps not as many as you'd think... it's almost all [twitter.com] in Russian(?). Oh, and don't everyone go check it out at once--we wouldn't want Slashdot blamed for the next DDoS attack on this fellow's account. I can see the headlines now...

Re:Asymmetrical warfare

[krou]

In Soviet Russia, the Streisand affects YOU!

Re:Asymmetrical warfare

[0xdeadbeef]

How do we know you're not in the employ of Putin himself? Answer the question, eldavojohn! Produce your birth certificate!

Slashdot Effect

[whisper_jeff]

Yesterday, he was the target of a DDoS attack. Today? The target of the Slashdot Effect. Poor guy will never have a functioning social networking page again...

Re:fp

[sopssa]

Well its kind of badass to be the sole purpose some of the world's largest websites got beaten offline.. Aww who am I kidding, the jerk from high school still wins.

False logic for fingering the "target"

[rgviza]

>had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time
That pretty much describes a large number of users that use YouTwitFace. Maybe YouTwitFace was the target...

Re:1-Year Anniversay of Russian Invasion of Georgi

[Ecuador]

The big nuclear missiles are on Typhoon class subs [wikipedia.org] that are, presumably, drifting around undetected somewhere in the Barents Sea.

Of course that is except the one which that nice Scottish-accented Lithuanian captain handed over to the US in the early nineties.

Re:Next time it's me

[toetagger]

And naturally, I would be the first suspect of doing so....

Re:1-Year Anniversay of Russian Invasion of Georgi

[value_added]

According to a report by the "Times Online" and another report by guardian.co.uk", today is the 1-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Georgia.

Aug 8 Dustin Hoffman born in Los Angeles, 1937
Aug 8 Montenegro declares war on Germany, 1914
Aug 8 Richard Nixon resigns the US presidency, 1974
Aug 8 The Great Train Robbery -- $7,368,000, 1963

The above suggests to me that it's American Neocons seeking to regain the power of the presidency, working in conjunction with Serbian terrorists angry at their Montenegrin brothers along with a few German Nazis still fighting the good fight, a plot funded by the money stolen in 1963, and spearheaded by none other than than Dustin Hoffman.

Re:how would you react

[c6gunner]

You really should study Russian history, from the Russian perspective

That's rather like studying Scientology from L. Ron Hubbards perspective.