The recent denial of service attacks on the popular micro blog website Twitter served as a reminder that we should not fully rely on a single service for everything we do online. These malicious attacks make websites unavailable for customers by sending millions of requests one after the other, so the service will stop being responsive and thus, as in the case of Twitter, become unavailable.
You would think that a popular website like twitter would have the means to prevent such attacks. But due to Twitters’ explosive growth and developing infrastructure, there was nothing that could be done immediately.
Facebook and other social websites were affected by the attacks on Twitter because some applications are run through these social networks. It’s still unclear the source of the problem and the Twitter administration claims to be working to find out exactly what happened so it’ll never take place again but some experts say that in situations like this, financial motives are always behind the attackers’ main reasons. The motive being monetary or not, the realization is that websites we use and rely on so much everday, can someday just be rendered inoperative from a single attack.