Monday, August 10, 2009

Defense Options for US-Based Social Networks



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A post on the Twitter Status Web site mid-morning Friday indicated the social network was still parrying attacks. "Due to defensive measures we've taken against the ongoing denial-of-service attack, some Twitter clients are unable to communicate with our API (application programming interface) and many users are unable to tweet via SMS (short message service)," the post said. "We are working as quickly as possible to restore our full service."

Twitter's rapid user growth over the past year may have outpaced its ability to protect its infrastructure from DDoS attacks. Facebook and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) More about Google are larger, fully developed companies and have more backup ability when it comes to server issues. Still, Burton said Thursday's attacks show just how much botnet power Russia and other countries may have at their disposal.

"To be blunt, our options are very limited," he explained. 'When a multinational corporation or publicly held company is going against the resources of a hostile foreign intelligence agency, they're greatly undermanned from a technology perspective. They simply don't have the bandwidth to do battle with a foreign intelligence service.

"It's a cat-and-mouse game," he said. "Even the folks sitting around at the Pentagon have to game-board this out and say, 'How can we prevent this from happening in the future?'"

From the Russian perspective, Thursday's attack gives them an idea of what their hackers can accomplish -- and get away with.

"There are a lot of lessons learned on both sides of the fence from this," Burton said.






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