Twitter hit by second DDoS attack

Less than a week after Twitter was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack, the microblogging site was hit by hackers again late yesterday.

This time, however, the Twitter stood up much better to the attack, only going down for about 30 minutes, about 90 minutes less than last week, Twitter said in a blog post. It added that Twitter personnel are analysing traffic data to determine the specific nature of the latest attack.

It's so far unclear whether Tuesday's attack is related to last week's hack of the Twitter and Facebook social networks along with other sites. Security experts have said that the earlier trouble was likely politically motivated and targeted a single person, a pro-Georgian blogger identified only as "Cyxymu."

Today, security analysts said they don't yet have enough information to determine whether the two attacks are related.

"We don't know enough about the latest attack to know if it was still targeting the single pro-Georgian blogger, or whether it was another group proving its abilities against Twitter," said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant for Sophos. "It wouldn't be eyebrow-raising normally to see a website suffer a series of denial-of-service attacks, as quite often they are initiated by cybercriminals in an attempt to procure money out of the victim via blackmail. In other words, they might prove their ability to knock out the site on a number of occasions."