Twitter & Facebook Hacked

All across the internet, stories are popping up that two of the most popular social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook, have been hacked today. While Facebook didn't seem to experience much downtime and has been working (albeit slower than normal at times), Twitter is still feeling the effects of the DDoS attacks brought upon their servers today.

So what exactly is a DDoS attack? It's simple really. Essentially, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) is a method of hacking in which the hacker take control of many computers and flood a target (in this case, Twitter & Facebook) website with requests to their domain. Over time, this extreme amount of requests to the website will cause it to reset and eventually shut down. You will also notice that while a DDoS attack is underway, the target site will become sluggish to the point of unusable. This is what has been happening all day on Twitter. According to CNet, Twitter started feeling the effect of DDoS around 6am PDT. And as of the time that this blog was written, "DDoS" remains one of the most popular topics on Twitter's homepage.

It blows my mind how easily it can be to take down a web site with a simple denial of service attack. This is probably one of the most common ways that hackers go about bringing a site down, and it baffles me that immensely popular sites such as Twitter can be brought to a grinding halt with such ease. I just hope that they get their act in order so that this can be prevented in the future.

In my opinion, it is quite telling of how dependent we are becoming on social media sites. Where is this going to end? Everyone I know uses one of the two sites mentioned in this post, some even use it to the point where it might even be considered obsessive. I just wonder what the next step in social networking is going to be, and also how easy it will be to bring to it's knees...