There was a disturbance in the social media network yesterday, which especially effected Twitter and Facebook. The WaPo reports:
… Some news outlets, such as The Register, say the surge in Internet traffic that crushed Twitter was the result of a “Joe Job.” This is a type of reputation attack in which a large volume of spam is sent out designed to look like it came from someone else, with the intention of incurring anger against that person by the recipients of the spam, or causing the apparent sender’s account to be suspended for allegedly sending spam. …
A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google’s Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial-of-service attack that led to the sitewide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.
The blogger, who uses the account name “Cyxymu,” (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.
“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” Kelly said. “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.” …
Feminists are all too familiar with technological approaches to silencing. This bears watching.
–Ann Bartow
