Am I the only one who felt this way? No, not like an atomic bomb had gone off… but rather that the web attack targeted at a pro-Georgian blogger that took down Twitter and partly affected Facebook, LiveJournal and Google, was simply unbelievable! And it made me wonder: “What if Twitter and Facebook vanished?”

Until now (to my limited network security knowledge) the DDoS attacks were sort of like getting back at “the man,” at the big corporation, in retaliation for something.

But yesterday’s attack was different. It was aimed at an individual (I don’t know how powerful or influential of an individual, but a single person nonetheless). It can be compared to taking down an entire city with an atomic bomb just to quiet a single voice.

What are the things I am most impressed with?
1) An attack of this scale is possible and Twitter is vulnerable to it, as well as FB, Google and LiveJournal too, to a certain degree).
2) Because this kind of attack is possible and because we’ve gotten to depend so much on social media and the Web for our communications, as crazy as it sounds, this kind of attack partly accomplished its purpose (while disrupting the day/s of many more people and groups, naturally).
3) In the future, attacks of this kind could become more common, because of (1) and (2). So organizations (and individuals) need to think about building redundancy in terms of the channels they use to communicate and disseminate information (while keeping them manageable -not easy, I know). Companies like Twitter need to look real close at what happened in order to protect themselves (and their users, in the process) from such dramatic disruptions in the future.