No clarity is there as to who coordinated the attack against Twitter and with what motives. However, it is considered that a popularity of a website often motivates such cyber threats. Cyber Security experts on the other hand have indicated financial motives could not be ruled out in case of such attacks. Twitter was reported to have 44 million unique visitors in the month of June alone.
Is this the first time that Twitter got hit by a hack attack? The answer is affirmative as last month itself some hacker had managed to break into the Google account of Twitter staff and had gone on to publish their personal information and company finances reports online. However, Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder denied that the recent attack was related to any previous attempts and was a case of security breach. He went on record saying, "Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we defend and later investigate.
On Thursday at around 9:30 a.m. ET, Twitter site went down and a denial-of-service was reported by millions of users. In a quick recovery, the site was restored at 11.30 am by security experts. According to experts, when a hacker employs a bunch of infected computers to hurl bad information to the site to overwhelm it, there arises a denial-of-service situation. An analyst with Web security firm Symantec, John Harrison stated that it is real difficult to learn the identity of the attacker, or attackers, as they could be anywhere on Earth and the infected network could extend to several countries.
It was clarified by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team that ‘it's impossible for Web developers to fully prevent such attacks. But everyday computer users can ensure that their machines aren't used in a coordinated attack like the one seen Thursday.’ Users all over the world have been advised to safeguard their personal computers by, updating anti-virus software, creating difficult-to-crack passwords & maintaining computer firewalls.
