Twitter昨日遭遇攻击 瘫痪两个多小时

What might have been no more than a teenage prank knocked Twitter, the fast-growing internet communications service, offline for more than two hours yesterday.

迅速壮大的互联网通信服务网站Twitter昨日受到攻击，中断服务达两个多小时，这可能不过是青少年的恶作剧。

The micro-blogging firm, whose service allows text and web posting of messages of 140 characters or less, said it was hit by a denial-of-service attack, in which thousands of personal computers attempt simultaneous connections, slowing the target site's response to a virtual standstill.

这家微型博客服务公司表示，网站受到拒绝服务攻击(denial-of-service, DOS)。DOS指的是成千上万个人电脑同时试图连接某个网站，致使目标站点响应速度变慢，近乎完全瘫痪。Twitter允许用户发表不超过140个字符的文本和网络帖子。

The same type of cyber-attack crippled US and South Korean government websites last month, although Twitter has fewer obvious enemies. Other victims of denial-of-service attacks yesterday included the blogging company LiveJournal, which was shut down for a few hours and the social network Facebook, which slowed to a crawl. The popular Gawker network of news and gossip sites was shut down by a similar attack on Monday.

上个月，美国和韩国的一些政府网站曾因同一类型的网络攻击而瘫痪，尽管Twitter的“敌对方”显然不像它们那么多。昨天受到DOS攻击的还有博客网站LiveJournal和社交网站Facebook，前者中断服务数小时，而后者的响应速度极其缓慢。周一，深受欢迎的新闻与八卦网站Gawker也因为类似的攻击而瘫痪。

Twitter attracted 44.5m visitors in June, about half in the US, according to comScore.

据comScore称，Twitter今年6月的访问量达4450万人次，其中约一半来自美国。

“It's rare to have a homepage of a top-500 site be completely down for multiple hours,” said researcher Ben Rushko of Keynote Systems, which measures website responsiveness.

“一个前500强网站的首页彻底瘫痪几个小时十分罕见，”Keynote Systems研究员本•拉什科(Ben Rushko)表示。该公司负责测算网站的响应能力。

Set up in 2006, Twitter has been plagued by outages due to technical problems in the past and security professionals said it probably did not have the same capacity to withstand attacks as Facebook and other more established internet groups.

自2006年成立以来，Twitter过去由于技术问题一直受到瘫痪困扰，安全专家称，该网站抵御攻击的能力，可能比不上Facebook和其它成熟的互联网公司。

The outages once again underscored the fragility of internet communications at a time when Google, Amazon and others are touting the advantages of moving corporate work into the so-called cloud, where data and programs are accessible only via remote connections.

此次瘫痪事件再次凸显出互联网通信的脆弱性，而目前谷歌(Google)、亚马逊(Amazon)和其它互联网企业正鼓吹在所谓的“云计算”中开展企业业务的优势。在“云计算”模式中，用户只能通过远程连接获取数据和程序。

Denial-of-service attacks have been an everyday occurrence since 2000, when Yahoo and Ebay, the online auction service, crashed. Since then, many large companies have beefed up their software and hardware defences. But the methods and firepower used in attacks have improved as well.

自2000年雅虎(Yahoo)和在线拍卖网站Ebay瘫痪以来，DOS攻击事件屡见不鲜。从那以后，许多大型企业已增强了自身的软硬件防御能力。但攻击的方式和火力也有所加强。

Identifying attackers has proved almost impossible.

找出攻击者是几乎不可能的任务。

Security veterans working on the Korean case said that last month's attack was most likely by a disaffected teen or an online fraud gang demonstrating its might, and either type of suspect could have taken aim at Twitter and LiveJournal as well.

研究韩国DOS攻击事件的资深安全专家表示，上个月的攻击最有可能是心怀不满的青少年、或是互联网诈骗团伙为了显示自身能力而发起的，这两类嫌犯也都有可能把Twitter和LiveJournal当作攻击目标。

译者/管婧