How Twitter was Killed

On August 6, 2009 the popular social networking site Twitter was off the air. It was the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

Virtually all DDoS attacks come from groups of compromised computers (called botnets) composed entirely of computers running Microsoft Windows. This is made possible because Windows is fundamentally insecure and can easily be compromised.

To learn how it was done and perhaps why... read the full article.  And a follow-up article.