A U.S. company that manages crucial parts of the internet’s infrastructure says it has come under a cyber attack, making major websites inaccessible to people across wide swaths of the United States.
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The cyber attack that took down United States sites from Twitter and Spotify to CNN, Yelp and the New York Times on Friday was notable for its sheer size but also the fact that it employed internet connected devices, like cameras, to boost its firepower.
It was, security experts said, a reminder to many of how vulnerable the internet can be, and supported fears that DDoS attacks may be growing stronger in their ability to shut down wide swaths of the internet with a single, targeted strike.
Dyn said it is continuing its investigation into the root cause.
Hackers yesterday attacked Dyn, a major DNS service, with an absolutely massive DDoS attack that swiftly took a number of popular services, including Twitter, PayPal and Spotify, offline.
Former deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security James Norton pointed out that the attack on one company had caused mass disruption for many others.
“As we start to mitigate they react and start to throw something that’s over the top”, Dyn chief strategy officer Kyle York said, as reported by Sky News. Without the DNS servers operated by internet service providers, the internet could not operate.
It remains unclear who was behind the attacks.
Dyn is part of the backbone of the internet.
As of late in the afternoon, Dyn said the third cyberattack “had been resolved”.
The director of security research at Flashpoint, Allison Nixon said ” hackers dumbed a software a months ago on the internet and now, they are utilsing it and making every possible use of it in cyber attcaks”.
The hack was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack, which intentionally overwhelms a web service with traffic from many sources.
Dyn, which is based in Manchester, New Hampshire, said that by 9:30 a.m., the first assault was stopped, but at 11:52 a.m., its servers were again attacked, and then under a traffic deluge again at 5 p.m.
Some of that traffic was observed coming from botnets created with the Mirai malware that is estimated to have infected over 500,000 devices, according to Level 3 Communications, a provider of internet backbone services.
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On Saturday, Dyn revealed that a “sophisticated” attack involved “10s of millions of IP addresses”.
