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DOS on Twitter should make people cautious
12/08/2009
The recent denial of service attack (DOS) on social networking site Twitter – which caused its services to go offline for several hours – should make businesses cautious but it should not deter them from using managed hosting services such as cloud computing, it has been claimed.
According to infoworld.com, the problem with the high-profile service, which has many celebrity tweeters, is that it has to let anyone and everyone use it – not something that businesses tend to do with their IT systems.
The news provider said: "A DOS attack takes advantage of the openness, in essence hitting the site with so many requests at the same time that it can no longer respond effectively; it either slows down to a crawl or crashes.
"DOS attacks are difficult to defend against, because if you block one IP address, another pops up."
However, infoworld.com added that businesses moving their data to a co location facility or opting for a cloud computing solution can relax because they will tend to only deal with request from their customers – making a DOS attack much more difficult to carry off.
The DOS attack that hit Twitter also appeared to affect rival social networking site Facebook.
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