Many Twitter fans this week have been upset about their favorite microblogging site being offline several times, which is unusual for the third-largest social networking site in the world. Recently, unknown hackers have sent attacks to the site, succeeding in impeding the service and angering their many customers.
These attacks, called DDOS attacks, are common on the internet and often targeted to large, well-known websites. A hacker typically uses a system of computers to repeatedly send excessive requests to the website, overloading the server and clogging up precious bandwidth. The server is then forced to shut down and unable to handle the requests of its legitimate users. There are many reasons why a hacker would want to take down a website, but one thing remains clear: the Internet is a dangerous place.
These attacks once again raise the issue of security among social networking websites. If one person is able to take down an entire website, then it seems possible for him or her to infiltrate the server and steal personal information of all its clients. Many users have lost trust about the security of their personal information on such websites and avoided providing information that these services need to function. While other social networking sites such as Facebook have also been attacked, Twitter has been relatively unprepared for a security threat and stirred concern among its users.
Despite these attacks, many experts insist that personal information is safe on sites such as Twitter.com. While sending a DDOS attack may be alarmingly easy for a hacker to do, it is much more difficult and uncommon for a website’s information to fall into the wrong hands. Even Twitter is well-prepared for such an attack and will respond if necessary to keep information safe and protect the identity of its customers. Twitter’s site has since recovered from its attack and sends a message to all its users: Tweet away!
