Social networking, blogging, microblogging websites LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter and even Google recently suffered from persistent denial-of-service attack (DOS). The incident left the sites paralyzed from their normal operations.
Although Google has gotten through the attack after their readily quick response, LJ, Facebook and particularly Twitter were down for many hours rendering great damages on their visitor counts as well as caused panic to users/members of the mentioned sites.
Denial-of-service attack basically is a scheme made by perpetrators that aims to get the website unable to respond on normal request, resulting into failure of the webpages to load, thereby denying the normal services a website can offer to its users.
There are a couple of ways to do DOS. There are certain programs made specifically to perform DOS attacks. These programs are made illegally and are used by people who wants to sabotage a site's usability, specially to websites of big value to users.
These programs basically saturates the targeted computer/machine with external communications requests thus resulting into failure of responding to real and legitimate traffic. It can also result into a very slow loading of pages which eventually leads to failure of connection to the website.
There are 5 ways how DOS works: (wikipedia)
- Consumption of computational resources, such as bandwidth, disk space, or processor time
- Disruption of configuration information, such as routing information.
- Disruption of state information, such as unsolicited resetting of TCP sessions.
- Disruption of physical network components.
- Obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.
Th3 4 web giants are now back on their normal services. But who knows when such attack happens again. What we know is that this event taught a lesson to these web sites. Be prepared against these kind of incidents.
