Twitter, Facebook Shut Down in Attempt to Silence Activist

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: Social Media, Society, Technology

Published August 08, 2009 @ 02:11PM PT

On Thursday and Friday millions of social media users found themselves frustrated and without access to services like Twitter and Facebook. News reports soon came in that the outages were being caused by an ongoing and coordinated hacker attack. Just today, the story got even more interesting, with the New York Times reporting that the target of the attack appears to have been a single person, a 34 year old economics professor and refugee activist from the Republic of Georgia.

From the Times:

During the assault — the latest eruption in a yearlong skirmish between nationalistic hackers in Russia and Georgia — unidentified attackers sent millions of spam e-mail messages and bombarded Twitter, Facebook and other services with junk messages. The blitz was an attempt to block the professor’s Web pages, where he was revisiting the events leading up to the brief territorial war between Russia and Georgia that began a year ago.

The attacks were “the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don’t like one of the newscasters,” Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer of the Internet security firm F-Secure, said in a blog post. “The amount of collateral damage is huge. Millions of users of Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook have been experiencing problems because of this attack.”

Apparently, this sort of cyberwar has been an ongoing feature of the conflict between Russia and Georgia. The latest flare-up of the contact was the August 2008 South Ossetia war. South Ossetia was a formerly autonomous and now disputed region. The conflict around the region sparked in the early nineties and then lay dormant for a decade until the early 2000s.

A new feature of the latest contact was the element of cyber attacks meant to dismantle communications structures and sew confusion about information. There were some reports during the August conflict that Georgian government websites were under external control.

This more recent series of attacks included an attempt to discredit the professor by spamming millions of people with links to his online sites, as well as denial of service attacks meant to shut down those sites. The broader impact demonstrated both the fragility and importance of the emerging new media ecosystem.

“They aren’t set up to play the role of a global communications network, but very quickly they’ve come to represent that,” said John Palfrey, a law professor and co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

I've written about the use of Twitter in the Middle East and Iran before, but I continue to be astounded at how rapidly new media is becoming the platofrm for global political information. While it may sometimes feel like there is a lot more hype than appropriate around these new technologies, it behoves every activist anywhere to understand them.