If you've never heard of "Cyxymu," you're not alone.
Until this past Thursday morning, the Georgian blogger's user name was relatively anonymous, hidden in the tangled web of social media. But, it turns out, someone was following Cyxymu closely and wasn't happy with what he was writing.
At roughly 9:00 am ET, 'Bots' took over thousands of computers and reportedly pointed them all to Cyxymu's Twitter account in what's known as a "denial-of-service attack." In essence, those computers crashed the party by overloading Twitter's infrastructure with 10 times the normal traffic experienced by the micro-blogging service.
Twitter's co-founder, Biz Stone, would only go so far as to say in a recent blog post, "The massively coordinated attacks on Twitter this week appear to have been geopolitical in motivation."
Twitter's overload problem soon became Facebook's and LiveJournal's.
Max Kelly, Facebook's chief security officer, confirmed that the attack that disrupted the Twitter site and caused problems for Facebook and LiveJournal was aimed at Cyxymu.
By 11:00 am, Twitter was up and running again, albeit with many users still unable to log-in or access their third-party applications.
Cyxymu, who says his real name is Georgy, told the British newspaper The Guardian that he is a 34-year-old economics lecturer, and an active critic of Moscow's politics in the Caucasus region. He said he was the victim of a similar attack last year that crashed LiveJournal.
Georgy alleges the attack was an attempt to censor his postings on Russia's conduct in the war over the disputed South Ossetia region. He told The Guardian he thought the attacks were coming from the Russian government.
But with only 600 friends on Twitter before the attack, and with his main LiveJournal account only netting between 1,000 and 1,500 unique visitors per day over the last few months (small potatoes in the online world), would the Kremlin really feel threatened enough to want to shut him down?
That's doubtful, argues Evgeny Morozov, who has been tracking Cyxymu's blog activity for months.
In his blog for the international affairs journal Foreign Policy, Morozov argues the Georgian is a digital refugee and says "the attackers' real goal was humiliation, not censorship. A secondary goal was to generate awe-inducing headlines about Russia's cyberpower all over the web; there is no better way to do it these days than to make Twitter inaccessible for a few hours."
Either way, the attack worked. It made media headlines around the globe and, despite the "cutesy" nature of any story involving Twitter, it put the spotlight on a larger issue: Cyber-security.
If 44 million people can be shut out of their favourite social networking site by an attack on one blogger in Eastern Europe, are we really as secure as we'd like to believe with our banking, medical, and company information being posted online?
Although it held a news conference addressing the issue in May, the Obama administration has yet to name a cyber-security "czar."
In Canada, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan says Ottawa is developing a new cyber-security strategy in light of repeated incursions into the country's key computer networks.
Although encouraging that both governments are recognizing the dangers lurking in cyber-space, these new strategies will take months to implement, and any defensive mechanisms will likely always be one-step behind the hackers. What the Twitter attack has demonstrated is that it doesn’t take much to bring down portions of the web today, and that real action is needed, fast.
If they hadn't heard of Cyxymu before, it's a safe bet those responsible for our cyber-security know his name now.
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