Both Facebook and Twitter were hit with pretty severe DDoS attacks rendering them useless and unavailable to the majority of users.

The thing is it seems like it wasn’t a traditional network based botnet style DDoS attack, but a ‘joejob‘ attack where spam is sent out containing a link and the users clicking on the link contribute to the site becoming overwhelmed with requests.

The DoS attack has been confirmed on the Twitter Status page here – Ongoing denial-of-service attack.

The attack theory comes from Bill Woodcock, as reported by The Register.

Users looking to update their Twitter feeds or Facebook pages were likely disappointed Thursday morning, as a denial-of-service attack made both services hard to reach.

Around 9 a.m. Eastern Time, the number of responses from micro-blogging service Twitter fell precipitously, reaching a bandwidth of 60 Mbps by 10:40 a.m. ET, according to Arbor Networks, a networking services firm. Twitter had reached nearly 200 Mbps prior to the drop.

The service continued to be impacted Thursday afternoon, reaching a peak of 150 Mbps, about half of its normal peak for that time of day, according to Arbor.

It seems to be a politically motivated attack aimed at a certain anti-Russian blogger known as Cyxymu.

It targeted all web properties where had profiles, the main ones of course being Facebook and Twitter but also included Livejournal (where he hosts his blog) and his Youtube account.

It’s a simple but seemingly very successful method of attack, shown by the fact that it took out a couple of major sites which already manage large amounts of traffic.

Users also complained of issues accessing Facebook. The service confirmed midday on Thursday that, it too, had suffered a denial-of-service attack.

“You may have had trouble accessing Facebook earlier today because of network issues related to an apparent distributed denial-of-service attack,” the social network stated on its own Facebook page. “We have restored full access for most people. We’ll keep monitoring the situation to make sure you have the reliable experience you expect from us.”

You might have noticed a lot of failed requests if you use Facebook (JavaScript timeout errors and network pipe errors).

Facebook fell because of the same targetted attack on Cyxymu, they acknowledged such on their Facebook page.

Source: Security Focus

It makes sense, spammers will follow whatever is popular, wherever the social mass is at and reading they will bombard.

In the earlier days Myspace was a big target, now they are moving on to other sites such as Facebook. Social networking sites are an ideal place for spammers as they can exploit the trust between ‘friends’ in the system to deliver more compelling messages.

I personally haven’t seen any spam on Facebook yet, but I’m outside of the US, rather selective about my friends, networks and the information I publish there.

Social networking sites have become the new front in the war against spam, according to security watchers.

In the six months leading up to March 2008, social networking sites saw a four-fold growth in the amount of spam on their network. At several major social networking sites, 30 per cent of new accounts created are automated fraudulent ‘zombie’ accounts, designed to be used for spam and other malicious attacks, according to anti-spam firm Cloudmark.

JF Sullivan, VP of marketing at Cloudmark, said the type of spam advertised through social networks is the same type as that advertised by email spam and punted by much the same people. “There’s an implicit trust in social networking. People don’t think they’re going to be attacked with spam,” Sullivan told El Reg. “People don’t trust email anymore. Spammers are following peoples’ online habits.”

It’s scary though that 30% of new accounts are created for spam purposes, that’s a huge number! I imagine it’s a fairly simple process to search for accounts with a generated list of names and just ass them all as friends…then spam them with invites to few phishing sites.

Sometimes flaws in the sites can be used to generate messages that appear to be from people’s other friends.

Social networking spam can be messages between users or posts to walls or other similar applications. Social network spammers most often hijack accounts using fake log-in pages. Phishing-like tactics, password guessing and the use of Trojans to capture keystrokes are also in play.

Junk messages, rigged to appear as though they came from their friends, are more likely to be acted on by recipients on social networking sites compared to the same messages received by email. Social network spammers try to recruit friends by posting profile pictures that depict them as attractive young women. By recruiting people into their groups or networks it’s easier for spammers to subsequently send them spam.

All the major social networks have a problem with spam, according to Sullivan, with volumes of spam ranging from 15 to 30 per cent.

So watch your wall, it might be getting spammed soon. It’s true too that the demographic of most social networking sites is quite low on a technological level so it’s very likely that it would be easy to socially engineer them into clicking something.

Certainly something to watch out for, especially on how they are going to counter it. It’s gets boring to say it…but educating the users is the solution – not more technological strangleholds.

Source: The Register