The Man Who Took Down the Internet

The world's online community was crippled this week by cyberattacks that temporarily brought down Twitter and slowed popular site Facebook and LiveJournal. But if that wasn't enough to make you contemplate the fragility of our great Internet civilization, consider this: The successful assault on some of the Web's most trafficked institutions was apparently aimed at just one obscure blogger in Europe. The blogger, a professor and refugee from the Abkhazia region of Georgia, writes under the pen name Cyxymu. His posts describing the conflict between Georgia and Russia that took place last summer drew the ire of tech-savvy critics, who, as one security expert put it, performed "the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don’t like one of the newscasters,” with a string of nasty tools.