In a clear attempt to get the responsible party/ies to knock it off, Wired.com's Ryan Singel declares, "Is a Psychopath Attacking Twitter?"

[The attacks against "non-critical US gov't sites", Twitter, and Facebook] donโ€™t make any sense. And that means trouble, according to Ciscoโ€™s Patrick Peterson.

โ€œIโ€™m afraid two outliers make a line and there is something going on,โ€ Peterson said.


Are we sure two outliers don't make a circle? Worse yet, we don't yet know that this isn't an isosceles triangle!!!! *sigh* Whatever. Nice pseudo-geometric logic. What I really like is the psychopath label. Nice psychology there. "Hey, I'm no psychopath! I'd better stop this DoS! The internet media is telling me that what I'm doing doesn't... make... sense!"

So here's something: You hack on non-critical gov't sites because they're an archetypal hacker target -- and they make for good target practice. Now you smack on something where a little civil disobedience might be a good thing, and bring down Twitter and Facebook. Like World of Warcraft's Tuesday morning server updates that take the game off-line for a few early-morning hours (depending on your time zone), the attacks probably produced all kinds of alternative productivity.

Just one example: The Redskins have an in-house blogger on staff. Here's what he reported on his blog during the DoS.

I haven't been using Twitter all that long, but apparently it's become pretty snugly integrated into my life. Because when it suddenly stopped working about twenty minutes into practice, I was completely freaked out.


Addicted much? Reminds me of Jonathan Blow's "ethical gaming."

The real scary take home isn't that somebody DoS'd some life sink sites, but is instead the following:

It all points to one thing, Peterson thinks. Botnets are too easy to assemble. There are too many unpatched Microsoft Windows machines on the internet that get repeatedly infected and taken over.

โ€œThe barrier to entry is too low,โ€ Peterson said.

โ€œIt may that 998 of a 1000 criminals out there are out to maximize profits and minimize risk, but it doesnโ€™t take many of them to get their hands on a small botnet to create harm. Then you have a minority actor doing a disproportionate amount of harm.โ€


Just to think that there are so many schmoes out on the net that are too naive than to know their boxes are waiting to be commandeered. Nice.

(Perhaps I should be more upset that the 99.8% of criminals just out to make money without "harm" are okay. ??)

(And in other news, I'm now 1/6th of the way to 10,000 posts. Woohoo. Talk about your life sinks [sic].)