A series of major websites, including Twitter, Soundcloud, Spotify, NY Times, Reddit, Boston Globe, Airbnb, and now apparently Amazon and Etsy, were struck by a major cyber attack on Friday morning, with outages for some users being reported into the afternoon – though many have been seemingly unaffected at all. The DDoS attack was targeted towards DNS provider Dyn, which operates as a bridge between the URLs we type and the IP addresses of the corresponding websites. According to an outage map created by the Down Detector, effects were primarily felt in the U.S., though reached into Europe, as well.
As Techcrunch reported, security researcher Bruce Shneier wrote in September that the complexity and weight of current DDoS attacks are becoming more sophiscated.
“These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they’re used to seeing. They last longer. They’re more sophisticated. And they look like probing. One week, the attack would start at a particular level of attack and slowly ramp up before stopping. The next week, it would start at that higher point and continue. And so on, along those lines, as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure.”
According to the White House press secretary, the Department of Homeland Security is currently looking into the Dyn issue.
Source: Techcrunch
