Denial of Service

PayPal Releases Funds to WikiLeaks as Supporters Strike Back

Tricia Duryee in Commerce on December 8, 2010 at 3:29 pm PT

PayPal has just released the remaining funds in the account associated with WikiLeaks today, after restricting access to the account last week, according to a PayPal blog post. However, it did not not reinstate the ability for it to receive donations.

The Secret Life of Chatroulette’s Hacker Founder

Peter Kafka in Media on May 10, 2010 at 8:23 am PT

Can’t read enough about Andrey Ternovskiy, the kid who built Chatroulette? You’re in luck: This week’s New Yorker has an excellent profile of the Russian teenager.

Voices

China Journalist Group Hit With Cyberattack

Loretta Chao and Aaron Back, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal in News on April 2, 2010 at 11:00 am PT

An international journalists association in Beijing said Friday that its Web site was the target of cyberattacks, the latest in a string of incidents that have affected foreign journalists in China. The Foreign Correspondents Club of China said in a statement that it disabled its Web site temporarily to deal with the problem after it experienced persistent attacks over two days involving a flood of traffic that overwhelmed its servers.

It’s a Botnet Party Vietnam

John Paczkowski in News on March 31, 2010 at 8:20 am PT

East Asia obviously isn’t taking Google’s principled stand in China very seriously–not that you’d expect it to. Politically motivated cyberattacks in the region continue. The latest to be identified: A botnet intended to silence widespread opposition to a bauxite mining operation in Vietnam run by China’s state-owned mining group, Chinalco.

Voices

Twitter: "You Are Not a Target Until You Become Popular"

Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on August 13, 2009 at 9:01 am PT

Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, called the service’s recent attacks a sign of its significance in a PBS interview that airs Thursday. “You are not a target until you become popular,” he said, after PBS’s Tavis Smiley commented that the denial-of-service attacks were a “backhanded compliment.”

"Get-Out-of-Our" Biz Stone Talks Twitter Attacks on "Tavis Smiley"

Kara Swisher in News on August 12, 2009 at 11:33 am PT

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone can be seen tomorrow night in an interview with Tavis Smiley on his PBS show, talking about the denial-of-service attacks on the hot microblogging service recently. In the interview, noting that Twitter had spent 2008 scaling up its platform to deal with its exploding popularity, Stone said the San Francisco-based start-up was now trying to get up to speed on malicious attackers.

Internet Punching Bag Twitter Attacked Again

Kara Swisher in News on August 11, 2009 at 12:47 pm PT

Twitter seems to be like one of those toy Bozo Bop Bags for cyber-attackers, as it temporarily went down again today. In a post on its status site titled “Responding to site downtime,” Twitter wrote: “We’re working to recover from a site outage and will update as we learn more.” Twitter is now back up, noting that it is “analyzing the traffic data to determine the nature of this attack.”

BoomTown Decodes Twitter's Denial-of-Service Blog Post (So You Don't Have To)

Kara Swisher in News on August 7, 2009 at 5:17 pm PT

This morning, in a blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone gave more of an explanation for the outage that the microblogging service endured due to a denial-of-service attack. Fortunately, BoomTown can read between the lines in order to decipher the secret message herein! Biz wrote: The Adventure Continues. Translation: By “adventure,” I mean yet-another-friggin’-Twitter-birdie-crisis.

The Outage Aftermath: Louie Swisher Hearts Facebook, but Twitter Not So Much

Kara Swisher in News on August 7, 2009 at 1:37 pm PT

Like grandmother, like grandson. Yesterday, I told my No. 1 son, Louie, that Twitter was down, after a denial-of-service attack. He was–shall we say–not very sympathetic, as you will see in the video following the jump. Interestingly, Louie’s response was similar to my mother’s, who mocked the microblogging service at a gas station on the way to my interview with its founders at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference. As it turns out, though, data actually back them up. (Plus, see their videos too.)

Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal Back Up and Running After Attacks

John Paczkowski in Social on August 6, 2009 at 9:35 am PT

Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal are back up after being felled earlier this morning by denial-of-service attacks that rendered them inaccessible. It’s not yet known if the attacks were related, although, as a LiveJournal spokesperson notes, “it would be a huge coincidence” if they weren’t.