Is a Psychopath Attacking Twitter, Facebook?

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Thursday’s denial of service attacks on Twitter and Facebook, and the ones that flooded non-critical U.S. government sites several weeks ago share a very interesting common denominator, according to a senior security researcher at Cisco.

They don’t make any sense. And that means trouble, according to Cisco’s Patrick Peterson.

“I’m afraid two outliers make a line and there is something going on,” Peterson said. “We have entered the third generation of denial of service attacks, and anyone that plans on rationality of criminals is at risk.”

What does that mean? It means that assuming that the bad guys online are just a new breed of bank robbers can get you into trouble if there’s a few psychopaths mixed in.

The ongoing attack Thursday on Facebook and the micro-publishing site Twitter likely involves tens of thousands of compromised computers under the control of a single person.

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