Twitter - DOS attacks linked to hacker in Republic of Georgia

Twitter - DOS attacks linked to hacker in Republic of Georgia
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32336633/ns/technology_and_science-security/

Twitter crashed because of a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers command scores of computers toward a single site at the same time to prevent legitimate traffic from getting through. The attack was targeted at a blogger who goes by "Cyxymu" — the name of a town in Georgia — on several Web sites, including Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal.

The first was a spam campaign consisting of e-mails with links back to posts by Cyxymu. This drove some traffic to the blogger's postings on various social-networking sites, possibly to disparage him as the source of the spam. The second and more destructive phase consisted of the denial-of-service attack, which attacked the sites' servers by sending it lots of junk requests — presumably to prevent people from reading his viewpoints.