SAN FRANCISCO, (Reuters) – Twitter and Facebook said they suffered service problems from hacker attacks yesterday, raising speculation of a coordinated campaign against the world’s most popular online social networks.
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, was knocked down by a malicious attack that prevented people from accessing its website for several hours yesterday.
Facebook members saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles, which the social networking site said was related to an “apparent distributed denial of service attack.”
Facebook was working with Twitter and Internet search company Google Inc <GOOG.O> to investigate further, said a person familiar with Facebook but who was not authorized to speak to the press.
Speculation swirled on the Internet that other social networking sites had also come under attack, after relatively lesser-known site LiveJournal said it too had been targeted by hackers yesterday. But those rumors could not be confirmed.
The incidents follow a wave of similar cyber attacks in July that disrupted access to several high-profile U.S. and South Korean websites, including the White House site. South Korea’s spy agency said at the time that North Korea might have been behind the attacks.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said on Twitter’s blog that the site was the victim of a denial-of-service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website’s servers with communications requests.
“We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate,” Stone wrote.
A separate Twitter status Web page said later yesterday that the site was back up, but that Twitter was continuing to recover from the attack.
Google said in an emailed statement that it was in contact with some non-Google sites that were impacted by yesterday’s attacks to help investigate.
“Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services,” the statement said.
Motives for denial-of-service attacks range from political to rabble-rousing to extortion, with criminal groups increasingly threatening to hobble popular websites that don’t pay demanded fees, according to security experts.
Twitter’s newfound fame makes it an easy target for hackers, said Steve Gibson, the president of Internet security research firm Gibson Research Corp.
Twitter, which lets users publish short, 140-character messages to groups of online “followers,” is one of the fastest-growing Internet companies.
The number of worldwide unique visitors to the Twitter website reached 44.5 million in June, up 15-fold year-over- year, according to comScore data.
Security experts said a single group could have been behind the problems on Twitter, Facebook and the other sites as hackers evolve their ability to attack multiple sites at once.
“History would tell us that it’s probably the same attacker or group of attackers that is launching both attacks,” said Kevin Prince, the chief technology officer of security services provider Perimeter eSecurity.