Twitter on Tuesday suffered a short outage in an attack that followed a few days after a more serious denial of service assault.

Twitter appeared to be down for less than a half hour in the latest attack. "We're back up and analyzing the traffic data to determine the nature of this attack," the service said on its status page. No other details were released.

On Monday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the news agency AFP that the site continued to come under attack after recovering from an earlier denial of service assault, which brought the site down for more than two hours last Thursday and slowed access to Blogger, Facebook and LiveJournal.

A Facebook spokesman said the attack appeared to be directed at an "activist blogger" who had a presence on the affected sites.

The Georgian blogger known as "Cyxymu" was apparently targeted for his writing on the volatile relationship between Georgia and Russia after Russia's troops moved into Georgia's breakaway Republic of South Ossetia in August 2008. The Ossetian attack resulted in several days of heavy fighting before a ceasefire was signed.

The first anniversary of the conflict appears to be what led unknown parties to target "Cyxymu," which is also the name of a Georgian town. During the Ossetia war, Georgian Web sites suffered similar cyber assaults.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on managing risk. Download the report here (registration required).