For the FB and Tweet addicts, I wonder… did it feel like the world suddenly has no purpose? Tcshk.. so melodramatic.

Both Facebook and Twitter reported that they suffered waves of cyber attacks on their sites last week that caused their services to be disrupted. Apparently it was of the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack type and it was orchestrated in 2 waves. The first wave was a spam campaign consisting of e-mails with links back to posts by one of its users. The second and more destructive phase consisted of the denial-of-service attack, which attacked the sites’ servers by sending lots of junk requests to that users’ page.

Therein lies the crux of the issue. The attacks were not directed at these sites themselves but rather to one of their users. Apparently it is politically motivated and was targeted at a blogger who goes by “Cyxymu” — Cyrillic spelling of Sukhumi, a city in the breakaway territory of Abkhazia in Georgia. So someone somewhere who hated his (or her) guts attacked his online presence at several Web sites, including Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal. In other words these sites are just collateral damage in this political war.

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For most of us, the damage was minimal – if any. These social networking sites are just casual indulgence. But what about organisations that have chosen to use these sites as crucial part of their business? The outages would have caused them losses – just like the losses incurred when our TNB suffered blackouts a few years back.

Surely many have asked, is it wise to put your business reliance on this fragile online facilities? Will it be safer to do business offline – face-to-face the old way? It is easy to agree with this logic. But this is the same argument faced when one decide whether to embrace new things. Like automation of factory against traditional way of doing things. Like computerising your documentation against pen-and-paper methods. Like travelling on air against using road or sea.

But it still is daunting to think that someone could just bomb you when you have done nothing wrong. The thing is – we live in Malaysia where many of these cyber terrorism and physical terrorism are just things that your read happenings elsewhere. It could not happen to me – you think. But a lot of hatred is being sowed – especially online. We might not be so safe anymore…

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