Bringing the Social Networks to Their Knees 3 Twitter has become a part of the world's communication network; in other words, everyone is Tweeting. AT&T uses Twitter to communicate network outages for Internet service providers (ISPs). The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has inte- grated Twitter as a means for managing alerts. The US State Department even asked Twitter to reschedule their maintenance window during the protests over the disputed election in Iran. Numerous other companies and people use Twitter as their primary source of news updates. So, bringing down Twitter would have an effect on the pro- ductivity of these companies as well. Here is the twist to this story; the DDoS attack was launched against Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Google's Blogger, and YouTube to silence a single user. That's right; they didn't care about affecting everyone; they were just concerned with a single user. The attack was both a personal and political attack against a Georgian blogger that had accounts on all of these sites. Come to find out, the account Cyxymu was owned by a Georgian Economics professor. It is speculated that the attack occurred in response to the professor's con- tinued criticism of Russia's conduct in the year-long war with Georgia. A Who would have ever thought that one person voicing his or her opinion could cause an attack on an entire site? This just goes to show the power social networks have.