Twit'er Down

Okay, so I got a message from my dad today saying that Twitter was under a cyber attack. I was like are you serious so I went to Twitter and I could not and still cannot get to the site.So I went to Yahoo.com to see if they had something on there home page because they usually have the most recent information there but they didn't have it. Well, I know that my dad watches CNN a lot so I went to CNN.com and there was an article about it.

They do not know who the group is that is performing the attacks. How can someone crash a website? Well, since I own a business building and hosting websites then this is something I should know and if I didn't then I would be questioned. The answer is that someone has hacked through the firewall of Twitter and had overloaded the site with tons of information. If the servers are unable to handle all the request then the site is forced to shutdown until it is fixed. These things can take a while to fix if there are major viruses in the system or Trojans. Usually the larger sites like Facebook or Myspace have done many things to help prevent these things from happening.

I have a Twitter account but am not very fond of it. Every now and then I will log on just so I will remember my password. I occasionally update my status but I rarely do it. I feel that it is just a rip-off off Facebook's status update. Why would you want to go to Twitter to update a status when you could use Facebook to update your status and so much more?

I feel that the Internet is going to be the new war frontier because everything is done via the Internet now days. You do your banking, e-mail, shopping, selling, gather information, networking, and many more things. When someone cripples the Internet then they can take a lot of power. This sounds wrong but is it intended, but when you kill people, it is more of a temporary thing and can be handled. When you control the Internet and have the power of the worlds largest form of communication, then you hold a lot greater advantage than bombing a train station. Many of us including myself use online banking and do online shopping rather it be eBay or Froogle. When you do anything on the Internet rather it be typing a blog or buying something, you are at risk of someone using a key logger on your computer and seeing everything that you type. Everyone thinks that going to Best Buy and buying some software program like Norton will prevent this, but in fact it only just makes it a little bit harder.

There is nothing that you can really do to prevent it. There is always going to be someone smarter who is able to break through the Internet security. They actually pay people to hack into system and find the flaws in them. These are called ethical hacking and are very important to the process. Malicious hacking is when someone hacks with the intent to steal or harm someone. Without these people ethically hacking, the companies are able to fix the worms and loop-holes in there system making it complex for hackers to penetrate there system.

When your computer or virus program says it needs to update something, then do it! When there is an attack, patches are created to help prevent it on other computers. These are call definitions sometimes depending on the type of problem. The more you do the updates and the more you update you virus/spyware program then the harder it will be to have you information stolen.

So I am ending this saying that everyone needs to protect themselves on the Internet and don't put anything on the Internet that you wouldn't want used against you. If someone wants information about you, they will find a way to do it and the easiest way is the Internet. A lot of younger people can do some hacking that an older person would think would be very difficult.