And Just To Make It Interesting......

NEW YORK (Dow Jones) --Twitter Inc., the fast-growing microblogging service, was inaccessible Thursday morning, struck by a "denial-of-service" attack, the company said on its status blog. "We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly," the company said in a post shortly before 11 a.m.

In an update to the blog post, Twitter said the site is back online, but that the company is "continuing to defend against and recover from this attack." The site will remain slow for users attempting to access it while Twitter attempts to recover. Denial-of-service attacks are a common weapon employed by cyber criminals (see cartoon above) to disrupt the working of Web sites. Perpetrators enlist millions of computers to attempt to access a particular site. The site cannot handle the massive increase in traffic, and is rendered inaccessible.

While disruptive and hard to trace, this type of cyber attack is considered by experts to be a relatively unsophisticated technique. The attack itself doesn't attempt to infiltrate the internal operations of a company's computer infrastructure. It simply renders its Web site inactive.

The attack on Twitter represents the latest in a string of denial-of-service attacks against several high-profile Web sites. In early July, a number of U.S. government Web sites, as well as the Web site of the New York Stock Exchange and several South Korean sites, were the target of similar actions.

Originally posted at Carpe Diem.