The Twitter DDoS

Well, you know. Twitter has put themselves right in the middle of a national uprising in Iran and so are facilitators or perhaps enablers of conflict. I don't want to get moralistic or anything like that, but it should be expected that if you are helping one one side of a conflict that could potentially errupt into a full on civil war, that you are not immune to attack yourself.

I'm not saying this DOS or DDOS is related to the Iran issue, but I am saying that twitter has become a weapon of sorts, a communication enabler that benefits one side of a conflict more than another, so an attack like this is inevitable, even if this particular one isn't coming from the Iranian incumbents.

I'm curious to know the scale of this attack. It doesn't appear to be an exploit-based DDOS, just a raw flood of traffic. I don't know how built out they are in terms of upfront hardware, but ideally it should be 10G to the load balancers. And protecting that level of traffic isn't exceptionally difficult. Pop in 4 Cisco Anomaly Guard Modules and you've got 10G of DDOS coverage. And given Twitter's visibility and potential for angering folks indirectly, I think investing in that kind of hardware would be very wise.

just to be clear they are calling it a DOS and not a DDOS - it could well be the latter but it could also point to another form of attack.

that illustration cracked me up. i don't use twitter but i'm guessing that it's better than what they have on their app's error 500 message. maybe they should buy it.