The earlier speculation of the cause of the social media chaos has been confirmed. The attacks were all to silence one Georgian blogger with the username, Cyxymu (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) across all the sites that were attacked. Social Media has been pulled into the Georgia-Russia crisis to prevent the blogger from being heard.
Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly told CNET News:
“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.”
Kelly also declined to comment on who might be behind the attack, but said:
“You have to ask who would benefit the most from doing this and think about what those people are doing and the disregard for the rest of the users and the Internet.”
Sites under Google, including Blogger and YouTube were also targeted but have proven to be able to defend against these attacks pretty well.
Here’s a Cached version of Cyxymu’s Livejournal account: “Now it’s obvious it’s a special attack against me and Georgians,” the message in Russian said.
Read more on our full coverage of the DDoS Attack.
