During the first week of August several social networking sites, Twitter, Facebook, Live Journal, and several Google sites were attacked by politically motivated hackers who targeted a blogger named Cyxymu from the Eastern European country of Georgia who is an outspoken supporter of his country. 

During this Distributed Denial of Service attack it was only Twitter that suffered a significant outage, while Facebook, and LiveJournal suffered slowdowns due to the attack, while Google users were not significantly impacted at all.  To best understand what a DDos attack is, try to imagine fifteen fat men trying to exit through a revolving door at once.  What has just happened, they have clogged the doorway and no one can enter or leave that building, in effect that is what happened to Twitter.

This attack was brought about through the use of a botnet -- a large network of compromised computers that can be controlled by a central source.  Being compromised and taken over for an attack like this is done though spyware, and virus attacks that all Windows computers are vulnerable to on the Internet.  

It is attacks like this that remind us in CAP even though we love our new technology, and thrive from using the Internet to conduct our missions, we must always be vigilant and ready to fall back to the tried and true ways to get our mission accomplished.