This Video Shows A Day In The Life Of DDOS Cyber Attacks

Update: This is a video that’s been shared throughout the Internet purporting to show a concerted DDOS attack coming mainly from China and concentrated on United States internet servers on the day that Facebook’s service was down for many users worldwide.

We’ve looked into this further, however, and it turns out this attack bore no relation to Facebook’s outage on Thursday. For one thing, we’re told the time stamps don’t square up quite correctly. We’ve updated this post’s headline to make that completely clear. Meanwhile, Facebook says its initial statement that the outage was due to an internal software configuration error still stands.

So, as action-packed as it is, the video above was just another of the many global DDOS attacks that regularly occur in cyberland (showing why companies like Facebook have had to erect top-notch security teams for constant protection.) Technology companies large and small are increasingly targets for such attacks — as more people come online, the potential for havoc gets larger.

Update 2: And now, the video has been pulled from YouTube for violating the site’s policy against “spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content” (the title of the video said the attack caused the Facebook outage.) You can still see a blip of the video in the screenshot embedded in this post.

Original post: This past Thursday, a number of Facebook users worldwide were unable to access the social networking site worldwide for about a half an hour. Such an outage is big news for as large a site as Facebook, and at the time, the company acknowledged the event with a short statement that attributed it to a software configuration that had been enacted before the outage.

According to footage posted by a YouTube user called Tournaments Replays that was allegedly pulled from Norse, a security intelligence company that monitors cyber attacks in real time, there appears to have been a large distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack coming mainly from China and concentrated on United States internet servers on the day that Facebook’s service was down for many users worldwide. Video of the alleged attack is embedded above.