""This was not your everyday DDoS attack"
Friday 21st October symbolises a major cyber-attack on the Internet with many large mainstream websites being taken offline by hackers.
Twitter, Paypal, Spotify, Soundcloud, Indeed, CNN, Shopify, Guardian, Playstation Network, Urban Dictionary, Reddit and many more were targeted when a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was unleashed on the Domain Name Service (DNS) provider Dyn.
Dyn based in New Hampshire in the US, hosts and supports about 30 Fortune 500 companies. Therefore, all sites under their control were victims if the attack in some way or form.
Problems started early morning in the US with the initial outages being reported by Hacker News.
The company confirmed that the attack started shortly after 12pm BST and fixes were done by about 2.30pm but then another attack started a few hours later. Around 7.00pm BST the company put out a status saying the issue had been resolved and ‘advanced service monitoring’ has been put in place with engineers still doing further investigations.
This kind of hacking makes it impossible for visitors to access the site due to the nature of a DDoS attack. which literally hammers a site with website access requests from multiple sources with very large bursts of traffic at more or less a constant rate. Hence, making it near impossible for normal visitors to view the site and slowing down access.
A DDoS attack literally hammers a site with website access requests from multiple sources with very large bursts of traffic at more or less a constant rate. Hence, making it near impossible for normal visitors to view the site and slowing down access.
DESIblitz.com has suffered DDoS attacks too in the past so we are well aware the damage such an attack can do.
According to Trend Micro, a DDoS attack can be bought for as little as $150.00 and over 2000 daily DDoS attacks take place world-wide according to Arbor Networks and the ATLAS Threat Report.
The origins of such attacks by hackers can also be difficult to determine. According to Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategist, the hits on their servers were of a highly sophisticated nature.
“This was not your everyday DDoS attack,” York told the New York Times.
“The number and types of attacks, the duration of attacks and the complexity of these attacks are all on the rise.”
Added York, giving a warning that this may not be an isolated incident.
Some web security experts feel it could be the work of large nations such as China and Russia. However, no organisation or body has come forward taking responsibility for the attack and no source has been found. But it just shows how an attack of this nature by hackers can literally take down major parts of the Internet in one go.
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