The Cyber Attack on Sukhumi (cyxymu)
Anybody who regular uses Twitter may have been frustrated yesterday by the two hour outage, as well as some irregularities at Facebook. What you may not have known is that it was all caused by a massive, coordinated attack against one Georgian blogger known as CYXYMU (if his blog ever gets back up online, it is located here). The popular social media platforms, as well as LiveJournal, were taken down by the now familiar cyber warfare tactic of “denial of service” attacks, which seek to create artificially high simultaneous hits and requests which are capable of crashing servers (read this article to learn how easy it is to become a cyber foot soldier). It is these kinds of DOS attacks which have become frequently targeted against Russia’s periphery, such as Estonia and others.