Many USENET newsgroups are discussing the cyber attacks last Thursday on Twitter and other popular web services that disrupted the lives of online users this week, but the principal target appeared to be one man: a 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia.

The distributed denial of service attack launched last Thursday overwhelmed Twitter’s servers, and forced the microblogging platform offline for several hours. Google was able to fend off the attack, while Facebook said it had experienced some intermittent disruption to services. Livejournal, a popular blogging site, also crashed, as hackers bombarded the sites with connection requests, flooding the servers.

During the assault – the latest eruption in a year-long skirmish between nationalistic hackers in Russia and Georgia – unidentified attackers sent millions of spam email messages and bombarded Twitter, Facebook and other services with junk messages. The blitz was an attempt to block the professor’s web pages, where he was revisiting the events leading up to the brief territorial war between Russia and Georgia that began a year ago.

“I could not have imagined such consequences,” said he on a USENET newsgroup, adding that his blogging, aimed mainly at networking among Georgian refugees from Abkhazia, had already been targeted by hackers in October.

The attacks paralyzed some of the most popular sites on the global web. Twitter was overwhelmed by the distributed denial-of-services attacks. The site’s estimated 10 million users were unable to access it for several hours. Facebook, which has more than 25 million users, was also affected, as was Google.