Twitter has been down since 6am PST.  They changed the IP of their website and it has been confirmed this is an on-going Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDOS).  Twitter has partially recovered by I haven’t been able to send a tweet all day so I suspect many people are still having similar problems.  Twitter has had on-going performance problems during their amazing growth as I have noticed over the last year or so I have been using the service myself.  Although back in 2007 Twitter has confirmed their ability to scale with the amount of users joining on a daily basis.

DDOS attacks such as this one are extremely difficult to protect against and is a very expensive process that typically isn’t affordable to anyone but larger businesses.  In the end you typically need more network bandwidth than the sum of all incoming attacks and your typical bandwidth requirements.  With residential services offering 5-50Mbit connections for $50 and less, it is easy to saturate even the largest networks.  Although DDOS is very effective it is very targeted and is the second most expensive cyber-crime (according to the FBI).  Because of this, you will not see DDOS used on global level and generally something most businesses won’t experience.

Author: Christopher

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Symantec’s Monthly State of Spam report for March showed an increase in bounced messages that found spammers forging sent email addresses and using them in the “From” header of their own Spam messages.

Reminiscent of Backscatter, spammers are taking advantage of mail transfer agents configured to send back a list of failed email recipient addresses, an explanation of the cause of failure, and a copy of the original email. This opens a window for Spam attacks, as anti-spam filters do not block most “failed email” replies. Since spammers forge the sender’s address, this mail is going to be received by people who have nothing to do with the Spam.

Corporate networks will feel the greatest burden of the increased attacks. Using increased bandwidth and an increase of unwanted Spam messages in users’ inboxes will result in lost productivity. Networks are encouraged to configure mail transfer agents to not send back a copy of the original failed messages and require signatures for outgoing emails.

Author: Christopher

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