Popular social media site Twitter was hit with a denial of service attack this morning, causing the site to shut down for about three hours. According to wired.com, this was the first major outage the service has experienced in months, and possibly the first ever due to sabotage.
According to the Associated Press, Facebook was also looking into possible problems.
Twitter went down at about 9:30 a.m. ET and came back online, albeit sporadically, around midday.
A denial of service attack is when a hacker barrages a server with so much information or requests that it shuts down.
More and more schools and universities are using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, to communicate emergency and other important information to campus constituents, such as students, parents, faculty and staff. An extended outage of these sites could impact the delivery of this information.
Strengths of Social Media:
- Free
- Very popular with K-12 and college students who willingly sign up as friends of the sites
- When a campus updates its Web site, these sites can automatically update via RSS feeds
- No bandwidth issues
- Helps with rumor control
- Campuses use as intelligence gathering tools and can respond to inaccurate information posted on unauthorized sites
- Can be used to deliver non-emergency information to stakeholders
Weaknesses of Social Media:
- Usually, unauthorized individuals have created unofficial college pages, so it is difficult for visitors to know what is the institution’s official site. Visitors signed up on the unofficial sites might receive inaccurate information.
- Potential for hacking, denial of service attacks
- Another mass notification portal to manage, which requires additional staffing and resources
Application Comments:
- Campuses can visit www.namechk.com to determine if their sites have been spoofed or their names have been taken
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