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One individual may have been the target of the distributed denial-of-service attack that crippled a handful of social-networking Web sites, including LiveJournal, Facebook and micro-blogging site Twitter.

The attack, which left Twitter down for more than four hours and degraded Facebook’s service, was reportedly aimed at a Georgian blogger who uses the screen name Cyxymu, Facebook told the BBC.

Cyxymu, in his blogs, criticized Russia by its behavior in the war by the South Ossetia region. Friday marks one year since Georgia launched an attack against Tskhinvali, the capital of its Moscow-backed region. The attack resulted in an invasion by Russian troops that caused five days of fighting amoung Russia and Georgia.

Cyxymu says the attack may have been carried out by ordinary hackers, but that he is convinced the order to launch the attack came from the Russian government, he told the UK’s Guardian newspaper.

protection expert Jart Armin of HostExploit agrees that the attack has a connection

to the Russian government.

“We are pretty convinced of our facts of yesterday, [that] the DDoS emanated from the Russian servers and through the European spine,” Armin said. “These servers traced are clearly Russian core servers and controlled by the Russian government.”

Although the theory of an attack on Cyxymu was an interesting one, Armin has his own conjecture. He finds it more than a coincidence that the attacks coincided with the anniversary of the initial cyberwar that preceded the full invasion of Georgia.

“So the motives could be [to send] a brief anniversary reminder rather than to attack a specific blogger,” he said.

A Common Attack

The kind of targeted attack mounted on Twitter and Facebook is not only plausible but happens often, according to John Pescatore, a vice president with Gartner’s Net shield team.

“Many times an ISP is not the target for the DDoS attack; one of…

Original post by dhiram