Spammers crash social sites
This summer, millions were unable to Tweet what they were having for breakfast, or update their Facebook profile picture of their vacation in Hawaii. These popular social networking sites were targeted by "botnets" - computers infected by worms or Trojans, which are then taken over by hackers and brought into networks to send spam and viruses. "Everyone's on [Twitter and Facebook], so there are a lot of spammers on them, Dorvonda Payne, junior Communication major, said. "They make fake accounts and screen names and just attack users. But now [those companies] are getting smarter and learning how to block them." Not only do botnets send viruses to users, but they can be used to send out spam, steal passwords and overwhelm Web sites. In turn, this meant no tweets about lunch plans, vacation spots or anything else. ‘It can get frustrating when you're finally back online and it's lagging because everyone else is finally back online, too," Lindsey Fenton, sophomore biology major, said. "A lot of people get really freaked out and really realize how often they actually use the sites when something like this happens." These attacks happened to kick the estimated 250 million Facebook users and 45 million Tweeters offline for hours, even days while glitches were fixed. Twitter, the younger of the two, was hit harder which left users receiving denial-of-service messages, according to www.renovomedia.com. "When Twitter got hacked, it was acting strange and you couldn't tell if it was over capacity, like it sometimes is," Payne said. "It was down for a few days after that." When Twitter becomes over capacitated, a ‘fail whale' logo is shown on the Web site to signal service is down. But there was no familiar whale telling users to try again. These spammers may be causing stress to most users, and they aren't going unnoticed. "I think it's a clever way to advertise," Fenton said. "Obviously, I'd be angry if it happened to me, but if hackers are going to take the time to get into the site, they're getting their point across." An attack like the ones that Twitter saw this summer showed the lack of protection the site has. "It just goes to show you, no matter how many users, celebrities, or politicians use a site, that doesn't make it any better," Fenton said. "Everyone is vulnerable in cyber space." But in the end, users can blame the spammers for lack of Tweets. "You may not use the Twitter.com service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose," Twiter Terms of Service states. "You must not modify, adapt or hack Twitter.com."
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