Cyber Warfare 2.0 : Operation Myrtus

Never mind the jargon  (or hyperbole if you would prefer) in the title, cyber warfare has indeed been taken to the next level in last  two years. The latest cyber-attack on Iran through the malware "Flame" (dubbed Stuxnet 2.0) wasn't surprising enough, it was expected. In a post I had made on October 2010, regarding the advent of cyber-weapon in most probability, Stuxnet being a precursor to a range of cyber weapons. After all Stuxnet had proved that a  cleverly crafted code snippet  can do what perhaps air-strikes may not be able to. This malware was successful in taking over control the computers in one of Iran's nuclear research facility,destroying centrifuges and pushing Iran's nuclear programme some years back. Given the huge return on investment, , 0 casualty  and stealthiness it provided, cyber weapons if properly executed, it is only natural that other nation-states follow the same.

Posted By Danish 5:46 PM

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Will Twitter Go Down With The Waves

Twitter has been down for more than 2 hours,the last tweets on my time-line reflect panic as one would expect from the passengers of a ship as it goes down with the waves! Well, i haven't got a Google Wave account yet, the analogy is partly coincidental :p

Was i surprised? Not at all! This is not the first time that the micro-blogging site has gone down, since past few months,outages have become a regular affair and most likely will continue for a while. No! I don't mean to say that the guys at Twitter are not smart enough, indeed, it would be foolish to say that for guys who came up with such a brilliant concept such as Twitter. The only speculation that can be made is the probability that the issue lies deeper than it seems to us.

Outages are not specific to Twitter alone, most popular services including Google, Gmail and Facebook have had their blues too. It is an irony of fate that the very participatory nature of the Social Web is also the factor that takes it down often. For instance, the Internet traffic generated by Michael Jackson's death was much more than the servers were prepared for; it seems that most of the people in the world decided to use the Web to find more information about MJ, unprecedented numbers of requests coming in was interpreted as a DDoS attack by Google which then went into emergency mode. However, other Social Web sites such as Facebook, Friendfeed, MySpace and Twitter of course are far more open, consequently they could not balance the load and crashed.

So couldn't they build the service keeping load balancing in mind? This question is complex too, the Web is evolving at such a rapid pace that it is no longer possible to follow the traditional model where even the tiniest detail has gone through analysis and validation before the development has actually begun. Most of the popular service providers of the day are widely used for features some of which had not even been foreseen when the service was built for the first time. Adding newer features to existing applications is a continuous process that is conceived of and implemented in response to changing paradigms. Quick adaptation and innovation-on-demand is what drove their growth and has enabled them to change the way we use the Internet now.

Keeping the above scenario in mind, it is easier to understand why Web 2.0 websites often face scalability issues. Most of them had started up targeting a small segment of users, with plans to upscale operations on a future date. But as the service becomes popular and the user base increases exponentially, 
 too many requests lead to bottlenecks that make the system defunct for a period of time. There are technical reasons of course, I have come across quite a large number of papers blaming Ruby on Rails, the framework on which Twitter was built. This aspect cannot be refuted absolutely when one considers the fact that this framework has not been proven on large-scale application development.  Facebook has addressed this issue by migrating the background code, it also has a limit on the number of friends a user can add. But there has to be something more than the weakness of the development framework.

One of the reasons that i love Twitter for is the fact that there is no restrictions apart from the 140 characters per tweet limit and the model itself. Unlike IMs or Social Networks, Twitter delivers messages from multiple users to multiple users. This makes every user a center of information propagation or many-to-many messaging system yet the server remains centralized, so as the number of users increase the processes increase exponentially since every user follows an unspecified number of users and is in turn followed by other users. i am not aware of the business logic or algorithm used by it but can understand that it must be efficient enough to handle all those transaction most of the time. However, the frequent outages suggest that something at the fundamental layer needs a re-look at.

As i said in the beginning i do not have a Google Wave account yet but from what i have read and seen in the Developer Conference preview video, the architecture is more inclined towards being a distributed one rather than being centralized. i wonder if the folks at Twitter have looked in that direction, if the server is unable to handle the load now, waves of users are just starting to migrate to Twitter. Read: Has Cattlegate Opened The Floodgate?

Also read : http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/22/twitter-at-scale-will-it-work/

P.S.: Inviting my friend netgenre to write a guest article on data marshaling in the above context

Update
 Recently i came across (through Twitter, of course) a excellent article at High Scalability which offers to explain the different factors responsible for the scalability issue of most social media sites. i found the part on Pull-on-Demand vs Push-on-Demand approaches quite interesting. In the first approach, which  is followed by Facebook ( according to the same article), the service queries all your friends,fetches their updates and changes and provides them to you at one place. So if you have 1000 friends, it makes 1000 queries to show your friends update. So with every new user or even connection the number of queries to execute rises exponentially.
 In contrast, Push-on-Demand approach deals with updates in a different manner. Rather than waiting for queries,.it pushes the data to friends right when it is changed! The user no longer needs to pull data, since it is already there when s/he logs in. Of course this model is not without drawbacks but that is beyond the current scope.
But more importantly, which model does Twitter use ? 
i am not sure, but most likely it uses a hybrid of both model...Just a guess right now ;)

Posted By Danish 12:47 PM

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Has Cattlegate Opened The Floodgate ?

Holy Cow! Shashi Tharoor's single tweet has taken Twitter to every nook and corner of India. Now, even the most obstinate bull squatting in the middle of the vegetable market wants to know what Twitter is all about. Of course the cows let loose by their owners to graze in Indian streets are equally curious even if they are not mooing it. Indeed, a lot of people are signing up on Twitter, a vast number intend to do it in near future. But I am a bit skeptical, if most of the people have an understanding on what Twitter is and how it should be used.

I have posted some of my own experiences here

There some facts and opinions that I should mention before proceeding further. I think all Internet users who are not on Twitter can be broadly categorized into 3 categories. The first category includes people who use the Web minimally, their professional as well as personal agenda doesn't allow them to explore the social aspect of Web. As such the whole social media debate is irrelevant to them, at times they are indistinguishable from machines .

Then there are people who think Twitter is just another way of wasting one's time that could be utilized for creating artificial intelligence or achieve major breakthrough in stem cell research. However, you won't find them doing either, instead, you can find them participating in Orkut. Socialization, interaction, collaboration to them means going through photo-albums of this cute chick they came across in the friend list of another friend's friend. The main activity would include sending persistent add requests, leaving flashy images,ASCII art or corny scraps in Hinglish or broken English or do stuff that require little or no intellect. People belonging to this category, who think that the phenomenal growth of twitter userbase, eminent personalities and biggest organizations and almost every website extending tweeting functionality, is because of a social media hype and
who are convinced that Twitter is a waste of time should strictly continue with Orkut, Twitter would be an incompatible medium since the latter requires intellect!

However, there is the third category of users who do not doubt the utility of Twitter but are still not using it because they don't fully understand it or it has not worked for them. Indeed,there is not a single social website that one can join up and start enjoying or get results from day one. How effective social networking sites turn out depends on how well the user has created her network. This is especially true with Twitter since there are no photo albums of users, no social games or "which movie character you are" quizzes (well, there are mechanisms to share images, files etc but they are not integral part of the architecture.) . In other words, your experience on Twitter depends totally upon how you interact with other users (Tweeps). If used properly, it opens a completely new world of options, from real-time news to reaching out to targeting customers/audience and getting the most relevant answer to your questions. The potential is immense! In my follow-up post, I will try to compose a guide for beginners.

Posted By Danish 3:37 AM

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Is Cyber-Warfare on Social Web Same As Terrorism

If you are a web user then you must already know that some of the most popular social web sites including Twitter, Facebook,LiveJournal and even Friendfeed were taken down this week by miscreants. It is perhaps one of the largest co-ordinated DDoS attack since the attack was launched simultaneously on Twitter, Facebook and other popular social media sites. As a consequence Twitter was down for several hours outraging users like me addicted to Twitter. Even a day later the micro-blogging service was running slow and had major connectivity issue with clients. It is not surprising at all, Twitter already has an inherent scalability issue, its far more vulnerable to denial of service attacks.

A typical DoS a(Denial of Service) attack is one of the oldest techniques cyber criminals employ to cause damage to sites. The technique is wickedly simple, a large number of requests are sent to the victim server which, it is unable to handle and thus crashes or slows down considerably. Often this technique has been successful but compared to this the DDoS is far too powerful. In DDoS (Distrbuted Denial of Service) hundreds of thousands of computers are used to send data and flood the network, these computers may be in different parts of the world but all of them would have been infected with a malicious code that allows the attacker to remotely control these computers. A collection of hijacked computers is called a "botnet" which according to latest news are actually availabe for hire at a relatively cheap price.

Coming back to Twitter outage last Thursday, what is really alarming is the fact that it seems to be politically motivated with probable involvement of state-actors! Apparently this highly synchronised attack was not a random anarchist act, it was targeted at one individual, a Georgian blogger, going by the name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia), who had accounts on Twitter, Facebook,LiveJournal, Blogger and YouTube.[source] As is obvious, fingers have already been pointed at Russia, especially after the last years cyber-warfare between Russia and Georgia.

Only weeks back, there were reports of sustained Denial-of-Service attacks on US and South-Korean websites and most likely these are going to continue sporadically until it breaks out into bigger cyberwar or the political objective is met. Earlier, there have been politically motivated large-scale attacks against Eastonia in May 2007 , Ukraine and Lithunia besides the occasional but highly damaging attacks on US sites by Chinese hackers. China is reported to have been preparing for large-scale cyberwar. Of course, Jihadists can't be far behind! However, as with everything, the earliest politically motivated cyberwar involving DDoS was launched against Serbia under the auspicious of the US. Its another matter that, Serbians were equally successful in counter-attacking the NATO on cyberspace.

But as of yet, there hadn't been as big a collateral damage as has been the case in last weeks outage. The Social Web has become a very important political tool as we learnt very recently from Twitter's role during Iran elections and the massive protests later on. Indeed, web is quintessentially a democratic platform and we can expect far more political activism online but there is also the fear that the involvement of state-actors in disruption of what can be called "essential services on the web" is an alarming trend. If attack on civilians in real world is called terrorism and unacceptable in any manner, an attacks that disrupts Social Web cannot be considered any less than cyber-terrorism. May be we need global treaties or similar legislations to ensure that our social web lives are not held ransom by nation-states' military and intels, cybercriminals or cyberterrorists.

Update
A few hours back, Twitter came under another attack which disrupted the service for 30 minutes. At 12:17 P.M. PT Twitter confirmed the attack on its status blog.

More information....

Posted By Danish 5:52 AM

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Will Twitter Go Down With The Waves

Twitter has been down for more than 2 hours,the last tweets on my time-line reflect panic as one would expect from the passengers of a ship as it goes down with the waves! Well, i haven't got a Google Wave account yet, the analogy is partly coincidental :p

Also read : http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/22/twitter-at-scale-will-it-work/

Posted By Danish 1:15 AM

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