WREX.com – Rockford’s News LeaderHackers attack Twitter, Facebook

Hackers attack Twitter, Facebook

NEW YORK (AP) -- The temporary shutdown of the messaging service Twitter Thursday may have been related to the ongoing political conflict between Russia and Georgia.

Twitter says it suffered a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers command scores of computers toward a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through. Facebook also experienced intermittent access problems.

Bill Woodcock of Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit that tracks Internet traffic, says the attacks started with hackers using a botnet to send a flurry of spam e-mail messages that contained links to pages on Twitter, Facebook and other sites written by a single pro-Abkhazia (ab-KAH'-zhee-uh) activist.

Russia recognized as independent the breakaway regions of South Ossetia (oh-SET'-yuh) and Abkhazia after a brief war with Georgia a year ago.

Woodcock says it's hard to tell whether it was a case of hackers trying to punish the sites for publishing views they disagree with, or if they were directing traffic to the sites out of sympathy for the activist's message.