Did Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, YouTube, Google Sites and Google's Blogger all get attacked yesterday to silence one man? According to the testimony of a Facebook executive, they did.

A blogger in the Republic of Georgia with the username Cyxymu was the victim, according to Facebook's chief security officer Max Kelly. The claims cement earlier reports that social networking sites have been dragged into the Georgia-Russia crisis, leading to the first simultaneous attack on the largest social media sites. Kelly told CNet::

"It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We're actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can."

Google is quoted as saying:

"We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services."

As part of the attack, spam was sent to LiveJournal users that appeared to come from cyxymu.

Political Motives

The claims back up earlier reports in the New York Times that Thursday's attack was sparked by the conflict between Russia and Georgia. The aim was to take down Cyxymu's accounts, particularly the LiveJournal blog where he posted about the crisis. While Google's sites held up to the barrage, Twitter and LiveJournal proved less robust.

While DDoS attacks are notoriously hard to defend against, it's clear that Twitter was far less equipped to cope with such an attack: no doubt they'll be taking a closer look at how such issues could be handled in the future.

Full Coverage of the Social Media DDoS