Twitter back up after attack

Twitter suffered a widespread outage on Thursday after a denial-of-service attack. At around 1400BST on Thursday, Twitter went offline. Attempts to access specific pages such as the Twitter Blog via search engines have been greeted by security warnings. "Your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application," reads a message from Google's search engine when Twitter pages are requested. What is Twitter? The site reappared shortly before 1700BST. Twitter confirmed that though it was back up it was still "defending against a denial-of-service attack" in a message on the Twitter Status site. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, told Web User that the attack is the result of a hacker or hackers taking control of thousands of home computers and commanding them to visit Twitter. Cluley compared the denial-of-service attack like "trying to get 15 fat men through a revolving door at the same time, nothing can move," in a blog posting. Twitter is prone to going offline for short periods of time, but this is the most serious attack it has suffered to date. As to who is behind the DoS attack, Cluley speculated that is unlikely a commercial attack from a hacker looking for a ransom. It could even be a teenager in his bedroom with access to a powerful botnet, he said. In 2008 Georgia accused Russia of knocking key government websites offline through distributed denial-of-service attacks. Tell us what you think to the new Web User beta website!