The risks of depending on any single social networking or microblogging platform were once again revealed by today's Twitter and Facebook outage. These outages also highlighted the need for a national response to DOS and other forms of "Cyber Terrorism."

Unless the government begins "sanctioning" those who conduct these attacks as a matter of national security, they will continue indefinitely. Individuals and organizations who fail to secure their computers and companies who produce insecure computer operating systems and software are complicit in these attacks. Most attacks would be significantly more difficult, if not impossible to conduct, if perpetrators lacked easy access to the tools (bot computers) used to conduct their attacks and the targets themselves were better hardened.

Want to discuss this with me more? I invite you to join me on Plurk (www.plurk.com/JohnWestra/invite) a microblogging platform similar to Twitter, but with a threaded discussion format many people who have tried it prefer.

My Facebook inbox does not seem to be responding. Tried to delete some spam and nothing is happening.
Gerry

Twitter is still down as of 12:22p EST on my end.