You may have heard that Twitter, Facebook, and a few other social media sites were recently struck with a denial of service attack, otherwise known as DOS. And if you’re wondering what that is, it is essentially a strategic cyber attack that induces the use of multiple computers to send hits to a particular web server, or in the case of the recent DOS attack, several servers, for the purpose of overloading them to the point that no one can benefit from the services those servers provide. In other words, the server is struck with too much to handle at one time and shuts down.
Such attacks are more common today than they used to be. It may be because there are more servers to attack or because there are more people to effect. Or it could just be that there are more bad guys who are Web savvy enough to pull it off.
At any rate, for attackers to have shut down Twitter the way they did this past week, they’d have had to have had quite a few resources at their disposal. As a result of the attack, Twitter was inoperable for a day and has been slow for most of the past week. The other social media sites attacked were able to ward off the attack successfully and weren’t affected. So you might be wondering how you can benefit from social media optimization efforts if that kind of thing can happen.
Well, it’s a real concern. But don’t fear. It doesn’t mean you have to shut down your business. Be careful who you associate with online. While Twitter’s server was affected and not your personal hard drive, if you mingle with the wrong crowd you could open yourself to vulnerabilities. Download a copy of the latest spyware or malware software and keep your firewall up and running. Be selective about who you let in on your profile. It’s business, but it isn’t monkey business.
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- Should You Social Media Optimize For Google?
- Google Attacks Webspam – Again
- Is Twitter Considered Social Media?
- Cross Promoting Your Social Media Presence
- Is Reputation Management A Social Media Metric?