Did Koobface Cause the Twitter DDoS Attack?
Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal all were hit by distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Thursday, an apparently organized, concentrated effort on several social networking sites. So far, no reasons or methodologies for the attacks have surfaced. One researcher, however, has posted what he thinks might be a possible cause for the Twitter attacks: a new variant of the “Koobface” virus. “[T]oday’s outage is happening at the same time a new version of the Koobface malware was found in the wild,” Paul Henry, a security researcher for Lumension Security, wrote in a blog post. “This malware is using both Twitter and Facebook messages to send invitations that are designed to lure potential victims to fake anti-virus web pages. The speculation is that the onslaught of bogus messages that are directing users to malicious pages may in fact be overwhelming Twitter.” The interesting point that Henry brings up is that Koobface uses both Facebook and Twitter to spread its payload, two of t
