Monday, Aug 10, 2009    Text size: 

The blogger is based in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and operates under the handle Cyxymu, so named for a Georgian city. He maintains accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Blogger and YouTube.

Cyxymu's blogs include commentary about politics and are apparently popular enough and incendiary enough to have sparked the ire of Russian nationalists, according to multiple reports. This group targeted Cyxymu's entire online presence without regard for who was affected.

"The people who are coordinating this attack, the criminals, are definitely determined and using a lot of resources," Facebook security chief Max Kelly said.

Whoever perpetrated the attacks, they used a technique called "distributed denial of service," or DDoS, which floods a targeted site with a deluge of unwanted activity that results in the failure or extreme slowing-down of the site.

Facebook's Kelly said that in his company's case, the attack forced the site to "generate hundreds of pages a second, [and] that's a lot of pages our users can't see."

Although many sites were affected, Facebook and Twitter caught the brunt of the attack. Twitter was inoperative for hours, and Facebook was running sluggishly all day.

Google's empire managed to stay unaffected, as neither YouTube nor Blogger experienced any major outages. The tech giant credited its formidable technical resources for its strength.