Hackers
unleashed a complex attack on the internet through common devices like
webcams and digital recorders and cut access to some of the world’s best
known websites on Friday, October 21, 2016 a stunning breach of global
internet stability.
The attacks struck Twitter, Paypal,
Spotify and other customers of an infrastructure company in New
Hampshire called Dyn, which acts as a switchboard for internet traffic.
The attackers used hundreds of thousands
of internet-connected devices that had previously been infected with a
malicious code that allowed them to cause outages that began in the
Eastern United States and then spread to other parts of the country and
Europe.
“The complexity of the attacks is what’s
making it very challenging for us,” said Dyn’s chief strategy officer,
Kyle York. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation said they were investigating.
The disruptions come at a time of
unprecedented fears about the cyber threat in the United States, where
hackers have breached political organizations and election agencies.
Friday’s outages were intermittent and
varied by geography. Users complained they could not reach dozens of
internet destinations including Mashable, CNN, the New York Times, the
Wall Street Journal, Yelp and some businesses hosted by Amazon.com Inc.
Dyn said attacks were coming from
millions of internet addresses, making it one of the largest attacks
ever seen. Security experts said it was an especially potent type of
distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS, in which attackers flood
the targets with so much junk traffic that they freeze up.
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