Cyber attackers disable Twitter

Engineers at Twitter were last night working to recover from a cyber attack on the micro-blogging service that yesterday rendered it useless for its 2.6million Britons.



Firms and individuals trying to use the website anytime since 3.00pm were greeted with a 'connection timed out' message, saying its server was taking too long to respond.



At the time of writing, a denial of service attack was blamed for the outage, likely orchestrated by a hacker commanding infected PCs to all log-on at the same time.



To get recognition for the attack, the malicious party did not hit Twitter's Blog, allowing Twitter to dispel some users' initial fears that their IT team had blocked the main site.



"I wonder how many people thought this morning that their IT department had deliberately blocked Twitter because of concern that staff were wasting too much time tweeting about their first cup of coffee of the day.



"However, it wasn't your system administrator blocking access to your favourite social networking site, but hackers disrupting the service instead," reflected Graham Cluley, security consultant at Sophos.



Although Twitter did not mention "hackers", plural or singular in its blog posts, its latest security update did outline the online miscreant in all but name.



It said: "Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. 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."



Alongside Twitter users checking to ensure that their computers are not compromised, and using AV, security patches and firewall, security experts said the important issue is how Twitter recovers and responds.



Mr Cluley added: "The question on my mind is - why would someone want to attack Twitter? I can't imagine it's a commercial competitor of theirs, but it could be someone with a political or financial motivation, or a teenager in a back bedroom with access to an awfully large botnet."