Twitter Outage: Are You Responsible?

On Thursday morning, the popular social networking site Twitter was a target of an ongoing denial of service attack, causing the website to suffer various intermittent problems along with a major outage that lasted several hours.

The ever-so-popular social networks, Twitter and Facebook, encountered network issues that resulted in degraded service for some Facebook users and a total outage for Twitter users.

Now while we know you are not personally responsible for bringing down these two powerhouses of the social networking realm, you may still hold some responsibility depending on how well-equipped your computer is with up-to-date anti-malware software and the latest version of your operating system.

What's this got to do with the Great Twitter Outage of 2009? I'm glad you asked. Typically, a denial of service (DoS) attack results when multiple computers simultaneously try to access the site in question. The reason for this is generally due to the fact that the attacking PCs are infected with malware, causing your computer to be framed for the dirty work of another, less upstanding citizen.

As Symantec blogger Marian Merritt explained, "It's often the case that DoS attacks come from computers infected with bots, turning them into zombie computers doing their cybercriminal's bidding." Are things becoming clearer now? You see, without regularly updating your system with the latest in security software, antivirus programs and operating system updates, you are putting your PC at risk of being hijacked by a hacker remotely and then forced into slavery.

You can help prevent attacks by trying the following:

• Make certain your operating system and installed software is up-to-date with the latest available patches and security updates applied.
• Do not click on email message links that may redirect you to an unfamiliar website. Very often spam messages contain malicious links that take you to web pages that spread computer parasites or spyware onto your system.
• Make sure you are using an up-to-date anti-malware suite or anti-virus application from a trustworthy vendor.

Hopefully these tips will help you to better protect your PC, and stop any would-be cybercriminals from using your computer in their diabolical schemes through popular social networks such as Twitter.