Twitter snag tied to attack on Georgian blog

Washington Post

WASHINGTON — A politically motivated cyber attack against a single blogger in the former Soviet republic of Georgia is being blamed for a Thursday outage that left millions worldwide unable to access their personal Facebook and Twitter Web pages.

The attacks continued to affect Twitter service Friday for some users of the popular microblogging site, after completely shutting down the site for hours the previous day. Facebook service returned to normal Friday for its 200 million users.

Early Thursday, a flood of e-mail spam was blasted out on the Web, directing recipients to visit a single individual’s personal Web page set up at various social networking sites, including Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube, according to Bill Woodcock, research director of Packet Clearing House, a San Francisco nonprofit that provides support and training to companies that manage Internet traffic and development.

Woodcock said the spam also contained links to Web pages featuring the political musings of a blogger in Tbilisi, Georgia, who has been chronicling the tensions between his country and Russia.

McAfee, the computer security firm based in Santa Clara, Calif., said it began tracking a separate attack in which hijacked computers were directed to visit that blogger’s pages repeatedly.

The twin attacks quickly overwhelmed Twitter and other social- networking sites.