Some say it could have been the Russians – more legitimate reports say it was nothing more than some nerdy teenage hackers – but whoever it was that hacked their way into Twitter, brought the site to its knees for more than two hours.
The incident has left the world’s fastest growing social networking site a little red faced. However, the same type of cyber-attack crippled US and South Korean government websites last month, begging the question – does the world have a serial hacker on its hands?
Other victims of denial-of-service attacks yesterday included the blogging company LiveJournal, which was shut down for a few hours and the social network site Facebook, which slowed to a crawl. The popular Gawker network of news and gossip sites was shut down by a similar attack earlier this week.
The outages have underscored the fragility of internet communications. However, they also come during a positive time for digital communication in the media.
Yesterday’s RAJAR report highlighted that 21.1% of Britons are now listening to the radio digitally. A new communications report from Ofcom also revealed that we’re also spending more money on internet connections and mobile broadband.
And as only 10% of Briton’s would consider giving up their broadband internet connection sin a bid to cut costs in the recession, the government is investing millions of pounds to ensure we all actually have a connection by the year 2012.
Denial-of-service attacks have become relatively commonplace online. But as the digital communications industry continues to move on at a rapid pace, should we be worried about our internet security?
What is your theory about the attacks? Could it be a pesky teenager trying to teach us to remember a time when we didn’t communicate through a computer screen and just 140 characters?
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