A denial-of-service attack shut down major websites across the internet th
is morning, as DNS service company Dyn was hit by an apparently targeted strike.
"Hackers use unsecured devices in the internet of things – printers, coffee machines, IP cameras, open Linux computers and the like. Once they’ve been hijacked, the devices can be switched from sending normal amounts of data to and from your computer, to sending massive amounts of data at a single target, Ultimately, the traffic from hundreds or thousands of these devices can exceed the throughput available to a website or a service, denying additional requests access to the point of severely slowing down or crashing them.”
The affected websites included Twitter, Spotify, and Vox Media. In a note posted earlier this morning, Dyn, which is responsible for routing traffic requests for several sites, confirmed it was under attack:
Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.
The company said the problems were mainly affecting customers on the United States East Coast. "Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue," the company wrote.
Several other websites were shut down as an apparent result of the attack. Among those appeared to be Reddit, Airbnb, Tumblr, Amazon, and The New York Times, although the final list of those affected seems to be much longer. An outage map shows the scope of the problem:
Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.
The company said the problems were mainly affecting customers on the United States East Coast. "Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue," the company wrote.
Several other websites were shut down as an apparent result of the attack. Among those appeared to be Reddit, Airbnb, Tumblr, Amazon, and The New York Times, although the final list of those affected seems to be much longer. An outage map shows the scope of the problem:
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