Facebook and Twitter both Hit by Targetted Denial of Service (DoS) Attack

On an otherwise normal and happy Thursday morning, Facebook and Twitter both became the most recent high profile sites to be the target of a denial of service attack (DoS).

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 the site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, 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 said.

Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and the usual online services provided to customers.

Twitter. 'We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.'

Facebook: "We have restored full access for most people," the company reported. "We’ll keep monitoring the situation to make sure you have the reliable experience you expect from us.