Online Links:
| |||||
| |||||
|
Crashing the twitterverse
So, if you have been hiding under a rock, or whatever the digital equivalent is... Twitter was basically shut down today by a Denial of Service attack (they also hit Facebook and LiveJournal, inconveniencing my online zen gardening terribly.)
When I heard this news my first thought was thought, "Funny... but why's that news?"
Actually my first thought was "Damn, that's why I can't update this morning, and why my watermelons are about to wilt!" Chucking at the absurdity of interrupting broadcast schedules and announcing important breaking stories on the noon news came slightly after. Just to say that I'm as habitual of a user as the rest of the interweb.
I've read speculation that this was not actually a malicious hack, and more likely an 'activist' pointing out the danger of the propagation of malware-slaved computers that can be directed into DoS attacks. I think that a hacker taking the trouble to amass the computing power to enact this attack for a 'political' purpose is ludicrously unlikely.But think about the efficacy of such an attack at waking us up... if you look at the traffic numbers for the affected sites, Facebook, is alexa #4, with 20% of ALL INTERNET TRAFFIC, Twitter is alexa #21, 3.5%, and LiveJournal is #89, 0.8%. Seems like a bit of an annoyance to not be able to chat back and forth, but if you consider that that outage affected the internet activities of a full quarter of global internet traffic... well, that's a good reason to make the daily news.
After all, if it had been attacks that hit financial sites, or government sites (which happened last month on a much smaller scale) that would be an attack that would get people concerned with National Security very nervous. Or if it were sites that had serious economic weight? If we suddenly lost 1/4 of the online economy? That's probably upward of $150 Billion annually lately (extrapolating from here), so the 3 hours today of service denial... you know, all the geeks staring annoyedly at their iphones unable to tweet... would have incurred almost $20 million in losses if retail sites had been targeted (if my math is right.)
Enough to make people very nervous, unless you're just screwing with a few social networking sites
I'll not go on to long, as most of the implications are clear from this. As long as a very few sites have overpowering percentages of web traffic, those sites will be vulnerable targets, which means vulnerabilities to the traffic patterns of the internet, and to the regular commerce that happens online, and to that large chunk of our GDP that occurs over digital transactions.
I'm very curious as to what aftershocks will come from this little tremor we felt in the web today, and if anyone will bother to come up with a plan to prevent a future catastrophe after the forewarning from this minor annoyance.
