A Facebook executive has confirmed that the recent downtime issues and Denial of Service Attacks on Facebook, LiveJournal, YouTube, Google and Blogger were all part of the Russia-Georgia crisis and were targeted at silencing one man from reporting.
A blogger, based in the Republic of Georgia, with username Cyxymu, was the victim of a simultaneous attack on the bloggers personal Social Networking accounts, according to Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly. The claim reinforces reports that social networking sites are being dragged into the Georgia-Russia crisis for allowing users to report on the issues.

Max Kelly told CNet. “It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”

Google, whose infrastructure protect its sites from being taken down by the recent activity are quoted as saying:
“We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services.”

The internet is a portal for free speech and allows bloggers to share their opinions without restriction of content. Political propaganda and crisis information is freely available to view and publish on the internet without political censorship, but this obviously poses a threat to political activists. Are we seeing the start of a new wave of Cyber Warfare and will social networking sites need to offer more hardened security to protect against such attacks?

Article by Creative SEO – Search engine consultant