Twitter buckles under denial-of-service attack

Twitter is becoming a high-profile target for malicious attack

The perils of using web-based consumer tools in the corporate sphere was highlighted yet again today as micro-blogging site Twitter was crippled by a denial-of-service attack.

At the time of writing, the popular micro-blogging site had been down for about two hours, with the simple message on the firm's status site reading: 'We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.'

An updated message said that the site was back up, but at 4.10pm BST V3.co.uk was still unable to gain access.

Twitter is becoming an increasingly popular way for firms to generate revenue, according to recently released research from social media platform Wetpaint, and as such will be an increasingly high-profile target.

The research found that companies with the highest level of presence on social media sites registered an impressive 18 per cent growth in revenue last year, while companies with a poor or no presence recorded a drop of six per cent.

Wetpaint also revealed that links to Twitter in email marketing campaigns have increased significantly over the past two years. In 2007, 215 campaigns were linked to Twitter, but in 2008 that number had jumped to 2,540, and stands at a staggering 41,399 so far this year.

Nigel Hawthorn, European marketing vice president at network security firm Blue Coat Systems, suggested that the outage is unlikely to affect Twitter's popularity.

"It's early days for Twitter compared to what they'll be doing in five years' time. They'll need to deal with the demands of uptime like any other continuous service," he said. "Amazon, eBay and Hotmail all came through this learning curve."

Blue Coat recently updated its PacketShaper tool to allow IT administrators to monitor, report on and set policies according to Twitter usage within the organisation.