![]() ![]() Think of Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, PayPal, and Reddit. They support many of your favorite websites. Now we’re ready to tackle the original question: how did an attack of such scale happen? Ultimately, cybercriminals targeted a large DNS provider. When you want to see a website, this is how your browser finds the right servers to connect to. So when you type in “a DNS provider has to first translate those letters into numbers which computers understand. Computers don’t speak the same language as humans. Think of it as the address book for the internet. Whether you’re aware or not, the DNS is used every time a browser fires up. To create wide-spread damage, perpetrators targeted something that every website relies on: a Domain Name System (DNS) service. But one crucial fact is worthy of note: this attack didn’t hit websites one-by-one. We’re still unsure which devices or criminals were involved. Now, we’re still waiting for details from this incident. ![]() Even the modern kitchen toaster can be vulnerable. And with all of today’s connected-devices, crooks are finding it easier to increase their botnets’ ranks. ![]() Now how do criminals get a hold of so many devices? By slipping malicious codes onto devices that aren’t secured - or are using factory-set default passwords - cybercriminals can create an army of hijacked devices from across the globe. To really understand the scale of these attacks, watch these videos. Such attacks require a huge amount of devices to succeed - we’re not talking about dozens, we’re talking about up to a million. Essentially, think of a traffic jam so bad that nobody can enter onto the freeway. So let’s cover the term “DDoS.” A Distributed Denial of Service is when perpetrators flood a website with so much traffic that it shuts the site down. Plainly speaking, these tools are available to any cybercriminal wanting to get their hands on them. While powerful tools may seem miles ahead of the average cyber crook’s ventures, DDoS attacks aren’t incredibly complicated. Big names such as Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, and more count among those affected. The natural question is “ How did this happen?” It happened due to a Distributed Denial of Service attack - or DDoS for short. The resulting chaos essentially closed the entire East Coast of the U.S., before spreading to other parts of the country and overseas, from a section of the web. Using brute-force tactics that flood key elements of the internet’s structure, cybercriminals managed to shut down a variety of popular websites. SoundCloud, Shopify, Reddit, Airbnb, GitHub, and Vox Media were also reportedly affected, depending on a user’s location, according to Tech Crunch.We’re no strangers to Armageddon-scenario movies, but today a real disaster hit the internet. Somewhat ironically, Dyn’s managed DNS infrastructure is supposed to help clients deal with DDoS attacks. ET, Dyn finally beat back the attack, allowing East Coasters to complain on Twitter about Twitter being down. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.”Īround 9:40 a.m. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Google and Facebook, it should be noted, were unaffected.ĭyn posted the following to its website: “Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21st-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Long-haul Internet provider Level3 showed a mass of red on its outage map, centered on the East Coast megalopolis. Spotify and Twitter users and many websites using Amazon Web Services suddenly stopped working. This particular attack began at around 7 a.m. DDoS attacks on these servers make it impossible for real people to access them - and therefore the site you’re trying to get to - by flooding them with fake traffic, making them unavailable. Not quite, though the reality was only slightly less disconcerting: A massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against one of the major domain name server (DNS) hosts, Dyn, crippled a large number of websites and web-based applications, including those listed above and a plethora of others.ĭNS hosts help you reach the page you’re trying to access when you type it into your browser or click on a link - they reconcile the people-language used with the IP address of your destination. “Are the Russians coming to shut everything down?” you thought, wondering if you had stocked up on enough canned goods to last you through a nuclear winter. This morning on the East Coast, when you went to listen to your favorite Spotify playlist, you were probably met with some kind of error. ![]()
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