Experts are describing a successful Facebookfollowing the outage of the largest social networking service and the mysterious tweet by the notorious Lizard Squad. Moreover, the cost of such an attack is estimated to be so high that it justifies the vigilance of the company's engineers.
According to the latest official data on the number of Facebook members on a monthly basis, the service serves 1.35 billion users from the WWW and 1.12 users via mobile phones (September 2014).
Facebook 's size and scale make it "extremely difficult" to disrupt the service by repeatedly sending connection requests from multiple sources at the same time, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, experts told Reuters. These attacks direct thousands of infected computers under the attacker's control to the site, slowing or blocking access to users who visit it knowingly, with collateral consequences for overall Internet traffic on other, unrelated services.
The difficulty does not seem to discourage would-be attackers, since it is considered a fact that large companies such as Facebook receive many such attacks every day. In the vast majority of them they fail, answers João Miguel, Member of C3P.UP (Competence Center in Cyber Security and Privacy, University of Porto) on Quora. I cannot remember a DDoS attack that took down Facebook, even for a few minutes, he adds. Furthermore, the expert emphasizes, such an operation would have a very high cost, and therefore there would have to be a corresponding incentive, which I do not see, he concludes.
Other network administrators note that the social network has thousands of servers and an attack of this type would require a similar effort, making the possibility almost impossible.
Moisey Uretsky, co-founder of DigitalOcean.com, estimates the cost of taking down Facebook per minute of downtime. The service's revenue in the first quarter of 2014 was $2.5 billion, and he estimates that annual revenue will exceed $10 billion. Since there are 525,600 minutes in a year, each minute of downtime costs the service more than $19,000, Uretsky concludes. The social network was offline for 50 minutes on Tuesday morning.
Source: tech.in.gr
