Last week’s DoS attack on social networking sites – targeting one, victimizing many

Last Thursday, a Georgian blogger called "Cyxymu" - with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Google's Blogger and YouTube - was targeted in a denial-of-service (DoS) attack.  This technique uses a network of tens of thousands of compromised computers (aka “botnets") to flood a website's servers with page view requests, making it impossible for legitimate traffic to get through. If the amount of connection requests is large enough, it can crash an entire website, as happened to Twitter last week.

The simultaneous attack across various social websites was aimed at preventing Cyxymu’s voice from being heard. Not exactly the purpose of social networking! The victimized websites (such as Facebook) are actively investigating the source of the attacks to try and find the individuals involved at the back end and to take action against them.

Coordinated DoS attacks are not new, and have been used by cybercriminals for some time. Cybercrooks create botnets by sending e-mails with malicious attachments or URLs to millions of people. Once accessed, the victim’s machine it turned into a bot and becomes part of a botnet.

Once your PC is part of botnet, it could also end up on a trading platform.  Once this happens, your compromised PC can be infected with additional malware each time it is purchased by a new “owner”. You can read more about such trading platforms in our Cybercrime Intelligence Report, where we explain the workings of the Golden Cash network.

Make sure to check a link before accessing it! (Does it come from a trusted source?) To help you keep safe, we offer our free SecureTweets browser add-on.