As our tweeps have noticed, Twitter and Hootsuite and Tweetdeck… etc was knocked over by a technical assault yesterday morning and they’re still having issues.
Check out Twitter Status for the latest update.
Deal of the Day Still Running Despite Annoyances From Botnet.
How did this happen? Hackers. Yes, honest-to-goodness hackers. Using an army of PC’s (a botnet) commandeered using virus software the hacker can use these zombie PCs to send phony service requests to a server until it just shuts down. No one has been able to determine what the motive is behind this attack, whether it’s some punk showing off or something more sinister. From Telegraph.co.uk: “During last year’s conflict between Georgia and Russia, denial of service attacks were carried out against high-profile websites in both countries, although the perpetrators were never identified.” As Twitter is still a fairly new company, it was particularly vulnerable to such an attack that companies like Facebook and Google weather from time to time.
Since yesterday Twitter has instituted some security measures, but many of their users (American Nutrition, for example) are left unable to Tweet. We are still able to run our Deals of the Day, however, through Facebook and our blog. Hopefully Twitter can get this straightened out, best of luck to them. Let this also serve as a reminder to PC users to keep their antivirus software up to date!
