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Twitter used for DDOS attacks on Iranian sites

Friday, June 19, 2009

Tech-savvy Iranians have been using social networking sites such as Twitter and YouTube to transmit information about protests against that country's ruling regime since a disputed election on Friday.

But web security researchers say Twitter is now being used to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks on Iranian websites.

Richard Stiennon, founder of a Michigan-based IT security consultancy, said Twitter has been used recently to launch DDOS attacks on URLs inside Iran, including government sites of security forces.

Stiennon has spotted Twitter messages with embedded links that allow users to launch a DDOS simply clicking on the URL in the message, he told Computerworld.com.

Some commentators are cautioning that participating in the cyberattacks could end up backfiring and hurting Iranian dissidents.

Evgeny Morozov, a fellow at the Open Society Institute, blogged at the net.effect website of Foreign Policy magazine that the DDOS attacks could overwhelm Iran's networks, leaving the protesters without any communication with the outside world.

Everyone, it seems, is rushing to join the web-based support for Iranian protesters. Google announced that it had added Farsi to its translation service to help Farsi-speakers communicate to people in other languages and vice versa.

Spammers are also jumping on the bandwagon. Researchers spotted Twitter spam that includes keywords connected to the Iranian crisis to attract more attention, PC World reported.