DDoS (Distributed-Denial-of-Service) Attack, is a cyberattack paralyzing a machine or network resource from its intended users, comes in many different forms, from Smurfs to Teardrops, to Pings of Death, interrupts or suspends services of a host connected to internet.
In this very early morning, Dyn, Inc., the DNS provider, was under the attacks of DDoS massively affected the internet connection of its customers, especially to those in the US East Coast, including TWTR, PayPal, Spotify, NYT, CNN, Yelp, Netflix and many mainstream media. Later, AMZN as well reported this issue affected its users in West Europe. According to Dyn itself, the attacks were coming from a 'Mirai-botnet' formed by tens of millions of internet devices, like web cams, printers, thermostats and DVRs with components from the Chinese firm XiongMai, spread across the globe causing high difficulty to defend. Whilst the story is still in developing, Dyn continues fighting for the third and fourth waves of massive attacks. Per Reuters, this incident is now being investigated by FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
There are many speculations circling around on internet, including the Russia called "checkmate' in a cyberwar declared earlier by CIA, a vengeance for Julian Assange, the Father of WikiLeaks, got his internet cutoff, and the Federal Government tried to stop more dump of Democratic National Committee (DNC) email leaks.
This is not the first time Dyn, Inc. got attacked by DDoS. In Aug 2009, its CTO Tom Daly had posted a story of an DDoS attack to his company's managing domain name servers, but that incident's promptly dissolved by his team.
On Oct 21, 2002, "hackers tried to cripple nine of the Internets 13 root domain names system (DNS) servers, machines that form the backbone of the net by linking all domain names to numerical Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. For approximately one hour, these root servers endured a bombardment of requestsa 40 percent increase over their normal traffic from zombie machines under the hackers control. Seven of the machines were completely incapacitated by the deluge, known as a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS)."7
"On Sep 16, KrebsOnSecurity.com was the target of an extremely large and unusual distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack designed to knock the site offline. The attack did not succeed thanks to the hard work of the engineers at Akamai, the company that protects my site from such digital sieges. But according to Akamai, it was nearly double the size of the largest attack they had seen previously, and was among the biggest assaults the Internet has ever witnessed."
Therefore, as you notice, our internet infrastructure is so fragile that can be handily sabotaged/destructed and this cyber attack will not be its last. And, similar attacks will only be heard more often.
Today, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) continuously grows more and more, and the chances that they are unprotected are getting higher and higher. DDoS attack is not limited to commercial targets, but home hardly escaped as well. Intruders can easily tap into your network thru malware remotely controlling those internet device without your attendence to deploy and reach their motions they needed. It's necessary for you to get more educated about network safety (Security) for protecting yourself against crime.
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