• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 11, 2009

A Google spokesperson confirmed late Monday that the Mountain View, Calif. Internet giant "has been in contact with some affected companies," Twitter and Facebook, "to help investigate" the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that began last week on some of the world's most popular social media sites.

Thursday's DDoS attacks that knocked Twitter offline for hours and slowed other sites, such as Facebook and LiveJournal, continued through Friday and part of the weekend. DDoS attacks occur when computers bombard a Web site with requests for data, causing the site to grind to a halt. Hackers rely on botnets or groups of computers infected with malicious software to launch attacks.

Twitter cofounder Biz Stone wrote on the company blog Friday that the attacks appeared "geopolitical in motivation," but didn't feel it was appropriate to speculate before confirming. But reports surfaced Friday that the spam and the scareware distributed following the DDoS attacks on Twitter, Facebook and others allegedly was meant to silence pro-Georgian blogger Cyxymu, also known as 34-year-old Georgy, according to his YouTube profile, writes Sophos Security Expert Graham Cluley in a blog post.

Cluley explained in a post written Friday that it wasn't only the first day after the DDoS attacks that brought down Twitter for a few hours, but also "the first anniversary of Georgian troops moving into South Ossetia, an incident, which lead to conflict between the Russian and Georgian armies last year."