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Facebook Confirms Denial-of-Service Attack
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Facebook has confirmed to Wired.com that — like Twitter — it was the victim of a denial-of-service attack Thursday morning.
The service has been working just fine for me, but I contacted the Facebook press office to ask whether the rumors of an attack were true.
“Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial-of-service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users,” responded Facebook spokeswoman Kathleen Loughlin via e-mail.
“No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users,” she added. ” We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”
If Facebook was attacked by the same party or parties who drove Twitter offline today, as seems likely, it means two things: First, Facebook is more resilient to denial-of-service attacks than Twitter is; and second, someone — or something — really wants both Facebook and Twitter offline today.
Denial-of-Service Attack Knocks Twitter Offline
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Twitter was shut down for hours Thursday morning by what it described as an “ongoing” denial-of-service attack, silencing millions of Tweeters. It was the first major outage the service has suffered in months and possibly the first ever due to sabotage. The outage appeared to begin mid-morning, EST, and affected users around the world. After about three hours, the service was coming back online in fits and starts (updated).
The first official word about the outage came in a terse statement on Twitter’s status blog: “Site is down — We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.” That was followed by a more relaxed post on the main Twitter blog by co-founder Biz Stone, which nevertheless gave no indication of how the defense was going — or how long the service might be down.
“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack,” wrote Stone. “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 continue to defend and later investigate.”
In a denial-of-service attack, a malicious party barrages a server with so many requests that it can’t keep up, or causes it to reset. As a result, legitimate users can only access the server very slowly — or not at all, as appears to be the case here.
Not only was the site down, but client applications that depend on the Twitter API could also not connect to the service, creating a complete Twitter blackout. According to June ComScore numbers Twitter has more than 44 million registered users and its user base has been growing rapidly for months as it becomes better known in the mainstream.
ShareFeds at DefCon Alarmed After RFIDs Scanned
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LAS VEGAS — It’s one of the most hostile hacker environments in the country –- the DefCon hacker conference held every summer in Las Vegas.
But despite the fact that attendees know they should take precautions to protect their data, federal agents at the conference got a scare on Friday when they were told they might have been caught in the sights of an RFID reader.
The reader, connected to a web camera, sniffed data from RFID-enabled ID cards and other documents carried by attendees in pockets and backpacks as they passed a table where the equipment was stationed in full view.
It was part of a security-awareness project set up by a group of security researchers and consultants to highlight privacy issues around RFID. When the reader caught an RFID chip in its sights — embedded in a company or government agency access card, for example — it grabbed data from the card, and the camera snapped the card holder’s picture.
But the device, which had a read range of 2 to 3 feet, caught only five people carrying RFID cards before Feds attending the conference got wind of the project and were concerned they might have been scanned.
Kevin Manson, a former senior instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Florida, was sitting on the “Meet the Fed” panel when a DefCon staffer known as “Priest,” who prefers not to be identified by his real name, entered the room and told panelists about the reader.
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