It was yesterday, August 6th, about 17:30 in Moscow, when we saw Twitter, Livejournal and Facebook went down. So we run a story about it, here on Webplanet.ru. In our report, we suggested it could be a DDoS-attack to commemorate the day when the first American atomic bomb destroyed the Japanese sity of Hiroshima. August 6th, 1945.
Some hours later, Twitter and Facebook confirmed they were DDoS'ed. So the newspapers started to ask security experts what's the reason for these attacks. To our big surprise, no Western security expert knew about Hiroshima!
Lets see: The Guardian talks to Sophos and Symantec. "This seems like far too much to be a coincidence," said Graham Cluley, a senior consultant at IT security firm Sophos.
John Harrison of Symantec is also very "informative": "We're very surprised to see these types of attacks coming. Usually the people behind it want to use it for financial gain, not simply to take services away... It can be as simple as retribution against other hackers. It seems trivial and backwards, but it could be something as simple as that"
Then, PC World quotes Randy Abrams from ESET (wow, he's Director of Technical Education!). Again, the antivirus guy doesn't see the picture:
"Perhaps the bad guys are upset that Twitter has recently started filtering URLs in order to cut back on the amount of malware the user’s experience".
The Wired also tells fortunes by coffee grounds, with some help from Trend Micro and ThreatStop:
“This kind of stuff happens every day... there’s nothing to indicate there’s anything particularly interesting about the attack from a technical perspective... [blah-blah-blah]... It’s not clear what the motivation is for the attack. One of the most famous, and overblown DDoS attacks was launched against Estonia’s media and governemnt by Russian nationalist hackers and wannabes".
Oh, Russians again? No, wait! This is developed by New York Times to the wildest extreme. They found someone called Bill Woodcock, "a research director of the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit technical organization that tracks Internet traffic". That clever Bill said the attack "was an extension of the conflict between Russia and Georgia".
"It was not clear who initiated the attack, he said, but likely “one side put up propaganda, the other side figured this out and is attacking them". He said he found evidence that the attacks had originated from the Abkhazia region”, says the paper.
Sounds like Tarantino, huh? One side, the other side... And then, just a year later... both sides suddenly go and kill Twitter on the other side of the Earth! Attacks originated from the Abkhazia? Ok, let's call it Russia for this time! Americans never look at the map anyway.
Hopefully, the reader's comment from Mashable.com makes this theory better: lets talk Iran 'cos everybody talks Iran nowadays. Or Chavez from Venezuela. Big hacker, too.
Sorry but we have to repeat this for you, brain-washed and memory-editted Americans: August 6th is The Day You Bombed Hiroshima. The second bomb destroyed Nagasaki three days later, on August 9th.
