Light After the Twitter Eclipse

The Day After Twitter went dark has been fun to watch as people scramble to determine the why and who of the attack.  There is a very complete article in ComputerWorld that offers multiple theories.  Richard Stiennon was investigating in real time on the ThreatChaos blog and his updates were fun to follow.   One theory from Elinor Mills of CNET ties this attack back to the responsible party for the Korean DoS attacks in July.  While another theory says that the attack was focused on one pro-Georgian blogger in an attempt to keep him from spreading his thoughts.   The next several days should prove interesting as more really smart people unravel what happened. 

One common theme is the general sense that such an attack was not a particularly hard attack to perform if one had access to a botnet.  Botnets are clearly a widespread issue and while they often pop up as a vehicle for chaos there is not much seemingly being done to prevent them or shut down the existing ones.  For a good primer on how botnets are used in a DoS attack, see Elinor Mill’s post on the subject.

I also found it interesting that on Tuesday the Marines announced that they were banning Twitter, inciting a lot of second guessing on Twitter and the blogosphere.  Two days later the Marines look a little smarter as this attack showed that the Twitter infrastructure is open to compromise.  While I am sensitive that Twitter and Facebook allow our soldiers to communicate with home, I have seen enough evidence to know that these applications also could be used to create problems with our information infrastructure at critical times. 

Yesterday I arrived at our office and began a conversation with one of my colleagues.  Slowly everyone that was in the office filtered in and soon we were all engaged in some very interesting conversations about prospects, customers, our product direction, competitors and the broader market.  It was spontaneous, open, and very refreshing.  I say this because it was a reminder that with all of the ways to communicate –Twitter, Facebook, texting – nothing beats a face-to-face sit down.  I am hoping some folks took the time during the Twitter Eclipse as a time to get re-acquainted with such quaint methods of communication.