Word: hacker
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...Hackers slowed Twitter to a standstill early on Aug. 6, frustrating millions of users. For the culprits, all it took to snarl the popular social-networking site was one of the oldest tools in the Internet hacker handbook: the distributed denial-of-service attack (commonly shortened to DDoS), a method that has been used to crash some of the Web's largest sites, including Yahoo...
DDoS attacks are surprisingly low tech. Using a network of computers (dubbed zombies) controlled by a single master machine, the hacker tries to overwhelm a website's servers. It's a brute-force approach - the network of hacker-controlled computers floods the server with requests for data until the server overloads and comes crashing down. Graham Cluley, a computer security expert, likened the attack to "15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time." The attacks do no lasting damage - user data aren't compromised, and the site isn't down for long. Once...
USAGE: "In the neverending cat-and-mouse game with Apple, iPhone hackers have been toiling away for weeks trying to jailbreak the iPhone 3GS, which went on sale in mid-June. On [July 3], a hacker who calls himself 'geohot' released the first jailbreaking software for the device." --Wall Street Journal, July...
Then there's the nature of the attacks: crude and essentially harmless. Cyberexperts call them denial-of-service (DOS) attacks, because they do no more harm than slow down or temporarily shut down networks. No sensitive government network was affected: the hackers (or lone hacker, since this could easily be the work of one person) only went after unrestricted, so-called public-facing sites. The assumption among some cyberexperts is that such unsophisticated attacks must come from an unsophisticated source...
There's also the possibility that the perpetrator is much closer to home - some hacker testing his skills from a cybercafé in Washington. Experts don't rule that out, but say it's unlikely...