# Attack on Twitter

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/attack-on-twitter/185677>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [March 24, 2010, 3:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/attack-on-twitter/185677 "2010-03-24T15:41:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![pakothawade](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ba9def/32.png) [@pakothawade](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pakothawade)\
**Post date:** [March 24, 2010, 3:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/attack-on-twitter/185677/1 "2010-03-24T15:41:16Z")

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Hello,

Does anyone know the reason for the vulnerability in Twitter when a  
lot of DOS attacks were made?  
Were they due to the design of the application or the server where  
they hosted got attacked?

Thanks,  
Pratik

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**Author:** ![pakothawade](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ba9def/32.png) [@pakothawade](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pakothawade)\
**Post date:** [March 24, 2010, 6:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/attack-on-twitter/185677/2 "2010-03-24T18:43:20Z")

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On Mar 24, 2010, at 7:40 AM, tispratik wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Does anyone know the reason for the vulnerability in Twitter when a  
> lot of DOS attacks were made?  
> Were they due to the design of the application or the server where  
> they hosted got attacked?

It was a widely publicized distributed denial of service attack.  
Thousands of zombie machines were used to connect to Twitter,  
eventually using up all available resources. No application design  
decision could have defended against this, only more machines.

-j

* * *

John Adams (@netik)  
Retina Communications  
[removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)  
[http://www.retina.net/tech](http://www.retina.net/tech)  
this email is: [] bloggable [x] ask first [] confidential

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**Author:** ![pakothawade](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ba9def/32.png) [@pakothawade](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/pakothawade)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2010, 5:52am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/attack-on-twitter/185677/3 "2010-03-25T05:52:55Z")

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Thanks for the Information John.  
How do the zombies register for twitter? Can we not prevent them using  
captchas?  
Can the zombies get passwords of existing users?

Can anyone attack Twitter by logging into one’s own account?

-Pratik