And the target was a single user who vocally supports the Republic of Georgia. So says one researcher in a story getting lots of traction:
According to Bill Woodcock, research director at the non-profit Packet Clearing House, the torrent of traffic that brought the site to its knees wasn’t the result of a traditional DDoS, or distributed denial of service attack, but rather people who clicked on a link in spam messages that referenced a well-known blogger called Cyxymu.
As spam goes, the emails looked benign enough. One of them carried the subject “Visit my blog” and contained the words “thanks for looking at my blog” in the body. They contained respective links to Cyxymu’s accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube, all of which also reported receiving abnormal amounts of traffic on Thursday.
“This was not like a botnet-style DDoS,” Woodcock told The Register. “This was a joejob where people were just clicking on links in email and the people clicking on the links were not malefactors. They were just the sort of idiots that click on links in email without knowing what they are.”
Joejobs are spam messages that are designed not to push Viagra but to induce someone to click on a link in the hopes of harming the site being linked to.
CNet has more. If you’ve never heard of a joejob (I hadn’t) Wikipedia has a fairly thorough entry on it.