Twitter fights off a #Dos Attack

Some of you may have attempted to login to your Twitter account earlier this morning, but instead of navigating to the page you requested you were faced with a network error message. According to a recent blog post, the Twitter Guru’s worked on getting the 30 million plus user site, back online from an earlier denial of service attack (DoS or DDos). While the site appears to be okay now, further investigations efforts are being made by the folks at Twitter.

Denial of Service attacks – in there most basic sense- work by sending a large amount of requests to a website via computers that are infected by a trojan or other means. These compromised computers, or zombies, then work together to create a botnet. The botnet then enables attackers to utilize an immense amount of processing power to complete their deeds. Many times the shear size of these botnets, enables attackers to quickly bring a website to it’s knees.

While it has not been stated where the attack came from, similar attacks were made earlier this year on US government and South Korea sites.