Любимый начальник прислал про вчерашнюю цибер-атаку

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TECHNOLOGY

AUGUST 7, 2009, 2:22 P.M. ET.

Facebook Traces Web Havoc to Attack on Blogger .

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

Facebook Inc. is providing new details of how an attack aimed at a Georgian blogger Thursday disrupted its site and crashed others, including Twitter Inc. and LiveJournal Inc.

The company rooted out the cause of the massive denial-of-service attack, said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, after noticing that the compromised computers that began flooding its site Thursday morning were directing traffic to the profile page of a single pro-Georgian blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia. The Cyxymu blogger couldn't immediately be reached.

In a blog post Friday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said that the attacks were "ongoing" and "appear to have been geopolitical in motivation. "However, we don't feel it's appropriate to engage in speculative discussion about these motivations," he continued.

Mr. Schnitt said the attackers had tried to scramble where the hits appeared to be terminating in order to confuse Facebook's systems. He said the other impacted Internet companies told Facebook it was experiencing the same pattern. "We were able to figure out pretty quickly that it was all going to one place," he said.

Mr. Schnitt said Facebook is talking to authorities to find the perpetrators and hold them accountable, but declined to comment on which authorities.

Twitter, which was shut down by the attack, did not return requests for comment about whether the company had reached the same conclusion. A LiveJournal spokesman declined to comment on the cause, saying its investigation was still underway. A spokesman for Google Inc., which saw very small impact from the attack, also declined to comment on the likely cause.

Russia and its former republic have waged a series of Internet attacks against each other a political battle between them erupted last year.

The latest attack was the second recent attempt to knock the "Cyxymu" blogger offline. In recent days, the blogger had been the target of a spam attack that sent out emails with links to his LiveJournal blog, in an apparent attempt crush the blog with traffic. Thursday, after the separate denial of service attack, he updated his now-inaccessible LiveJournal blog with a message calling the attack "a special attack against me and Georgians," according to a translation.

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com