Caucasian Region 'Net War

The internet privateers of the Russian Federation are at it again:

Attacks targeting a specific individual took down Twitter and did some damage to capabilities of Facebook, LiveJournal, Blogger (our host, btw) and YouTube.

The (targeted) blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.

"It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard," Kelly said. "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."

Kelly declined to speculate on whether Russian nationalists were behind the attack, but said: "You have to ask who would benefit the most from doing this and think about what those people are doing and the disregard for the rest of the users and the Internet."

The attack was likely originated in Abkhazia, the Russian-occupied coastal region of the northwest of the Republic of Georgia. But in addition to tracking the perpetrator, the countermeasures available also did do some good:

Facebook and Google were able to minimize any impact to their sites. Facebook even managed to keep the Cyxymu account accessible to Web surfers from that region, Kelly said, although it was inaccessible to people in other geographic areas, including San Francisco.

Yay, team. Now to deliver a little "payback"...