Cyxymu

There were outages related to denial of service attacks on three of the biggest social networking Web sites – Twitter, Facebook, and Livejournal – yesterday.

What could be the purpose of such a thing?  Actually, it was a concentrated effort to silence a particular individual, a Georgian (the country) blogger who goes by the name of “Cyxymu,” an economics professor known for his criticisms of Russian conduct during the war in South Ossetia.

Cyxymu himself blamed the attack on the Russian government according to an interview he gave to British newspaper The Guardian.

He added: “An attack on such a scale that affected three worldwide services with numerous servers could only be organised by someone with huge resources.”

If it seems implausible, Max Kelly, Facebook’s chief security officer confirmed that the major DoS was targeted primarily at Cyxymu.

Max Kelly, Facebook’s chief security officer, confirmed yesterday that the attack that disrupted the Twitter site and caused problems for Facebook and LiveJournal was aimed at Cyxymu. “It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” he said.

Talk about a backfire, however.  Now everyone’s talking about Cyxymu, and people who haven’t heard of him before are talking about his blog.  He’s become the next Salam Pax.

I’m not sure what this teaches us about network performance.  Except maybe that we have always lived in a world where butterflies’ wings have brought hurricanes; it’s just that, with everything around the world connected, there are more butterflies and more hurricanes.  That’s the funny thing about globalization and the disappearance of regionalism due to the Internet; as regional problems become worldwide ones.

And not to end this on a sour note, but… let’s say it’s true.  Let’s say that Russia decided to take down much of the most important bits of the Internet in order to silence one man.  Maybe it’s time we started realizing that an assault on freedom to communicate anywhere is an assault on freedom to communicate everywhere.

Though with the human race being the way it is, I doubt it.