Massive DDoS Cyber Attacks Take out Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, and others on U.S. East Coast for Hours
Massive cyber attacks that took out a good portion of the Internet were the culprit of slowing or denying access to many large websites today. Netflix, Reddit, Twitter, and Spotify were among the countless websites affected by what is claimed to be a mass-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. During the attack, the affected websites became inaccessible bringing the Internet to a crawl and leaving many without access to some of the most popular and highest trafficked sites in the world.
Officials, along with the Department of Homeland Security and FBI, have been scrambling today to launch an investigation into who may be responsible for today's attack, which appears to be a mass-scale DDoS attack.
Among DDoS attacks in the past year, many of the high-profile attacks have been successful in temporarily bringing down large sites. Though, among those DDoS attacks, some have failed in their efforts to have a permanent effect on robust servers that host large sites that are known to be owned by large corporations, which inevitably have the proper security protection measures in place to thwart such attacks. However, today's attack was mostly successful in bringing many sites to their knees where it took hours to restore access.
Operations for some sites this morning were down for nearly two hours, and further disruptions took place afterward from a disclosed second attack. Amazon, currently one of the largest cloud computing companies around, reported outages that were resolved during the afternoon, a couple of hours after the initial attack.
The Internet performance and infrastructure company, Dyn, taking the brunt of the attack, was one of the first to come out with reports as to what took place for many large sites to become inaccessible to Internet users this morning. At 11:10 a.m. UTC, or 7:10 a.m. ET, Dyn reported that it "began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure." In an update published at about an hour and a half later, Dyn noted that "this attack is mainly impacting US East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating the issue."
Due to the vast reach of the DDoS attack, which severed access to many prominent sites, the U.S. government within the Department of Homeland Security enacted monitoring of the events. Due to the severity of the event and apparent focus of the attack, experts, along with the Department of Homeland Security and FBI, believe that the attack wasn't just some "script kiddie," as explained by Markus Jakobsson, chief scientist at computer security firm, Agari. He also added that "This not just an instant job, this is something that was probably worked on for weeks if not for months by really competent people."
As we are inching closer to the conclusion of the U.S. Presidential Election cycle, attacks such as the one to bring down several high profile sites raise questions and eyebrows as to who may be responsible. Though, while the DDoS attack probably has nothing to do with stealing data or leaking data on any front, the attack remains to be one that disrupts the lives of many as they were left without access to several highly reliant services for a few hours. It should also be noted that while DDoS attacks are comprised of bringing down web servers by serving so much web traffic that a server cannot handle it and it eventually crashes, the perpetrators don't always have to have a specific agenda. Though, we're willing to bet that this is the first of many more attacks to come in one form or another.
Services for most sites affected by today's mass-scale DDoS attack have fully restored services. The proper law enforcement agencies and security researchers will continue to fully investigate the attack and work towards ousting the culprit or culprits involved.