PSA: Twitter-hated

According to Yahoo!, a Twitter-blogger in the country of Georgia was e-ttacked by a bunch of hackers intending mischief -- though no one (or no one at Yahoo, anyway) knows why.

"Just who was behind these attacks is not yet clear, but the dispute was probably related to the ongoing political conflict between Russia and Georgia.

Gomi said the attacking computers were located around the world and the source of the attacks was not known.

The attacks seemed to come in two waves.

The first was a spam campaign consisting of e-mails with links back to posts by Cyxymu. This drove some traffic to the blogger's postings on various social-networking sites, possibly to disparage him as the source of the spam.

The second and more destructive phase consisted of the denial-of-service attack, which attacked the sites' servers by sending it lots of junk requests — presumably to prevent people from reading his viewpoints."

Now if your immediate impulse is the same as mine, you're now looking up Cyxymu's Twitter blog (it's in Cyrillic Russian, guys), and possibly Googling "Georgia and Russia" in another tab. It's been almost exactly a year since the war between Georgia's David and Russia's Goliath (or Georgia's Vietnam and Russia's U.S.A.?), and I guess tensions are, as they often will, continuing to run high.

The Yahoo article is mostly about Twitter and how everyone who writes there was left serviceless thanks to this attack, which I find interesting. It's as though there had been a chemical bomb released somewhere in Asia, and America's first wave of news regarding this had been what kind of dispersion and effects the chemicals would have on American soil, rather than a report on what happened. Both are helpful and necessary, but typically they come together.

It seems from other articles that Cyxymu blames the Russian government for what happened, which would make for a very interesting story if it were true -- at the very least, it could be a made-for-TV movie.

Let's hope some web users figure out the details of what happened, and learn something about Georgia and Russia in the process. It's possible that in doing so, they'll come to defend one side or the other...at which point, the attack on Cyxymu will be finished off, or the counter-attack on whoever did this will begin.