Twitter Attack Relatively Small Potatoes

A new article in Network World today claims the Twitter attacks of the past week have been relatively minor compared to the overall security attacks that occur on the Internet every day.

Network World quotes analysts at Arbor Networks who say that Arbor's ATLAS 2.0 Internet monitoring system last week estimated that DDoS traffic directed at Twitter was not in the multi-gigabit range that characterizes most large attacks.

From the article:

"We didn't see any evidence of a multi-gigabit surge towards twitter," he says. "Twitter has publicly said that they saw an increase in traffic but they haven't said anything about how much traffic yet."

In contrast, Labovitz notes that while Twitter was being attacked last week, an Asian ISP came under siege from a large DDoS attack that generated more than 30Gbps of DDoS traffic. According to Labovitz, such punishing attacks are commonly deployed against e-commerce sites, as well as sites that specialize in pornography and online gambling.

In case you're interested in Arbor's ATLAS system, here's some additional information:

Arbor's ATLAS Internet monitoring system is a collaborative effort that culls data from more than 100 ISPs, including British Telecom, Australian provider Netgen Networks and Indian provider Tata Communications. As part of their agreement with Arbor, all ISPs participating in the ATLAS system must share anonymous traffic data with one another on an hourly basis. Arbor recently upgraded its ATLAS system to monitor and collect real-time data for global Internet traffic, routing and application performance. Previously, the system had been used mostly to collect data on security-related traffic such as DDoS attack traffic.