It was doomsday for an Internet management company, Dyn when it faced a cyber attack on Friday morning by unknown hackers. Dyn announced that numerous websites had problems after it was at the receiving eNd of a DDoS by hackers. Issues were reported with Twitter, Spotify, SoundCloud, Vox Media sites, Airbnb and mainly affected the eastern United States.
The attack was resolved at around 9:20 am EST. According to Dyn,
Starting at about 7:00 am EST, the company 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.
DDoS is a term used for distributed denial of service and is a strategy used by hackers to take down internet-connected servers.
According to Cisco, an American multinational corporation technology company headquartered in California, that designs, manufactures and sells networking equipment worldwide, in this kind of an attack, the hackers build a network of computers that sends extensive amount of traffic to particular servers so that the use of those servers is denied to other users.
The attacks have increased in frequency and scope of late. Attackers have been recruiting a host of Internet enabled devices including video cameras and the sort, to attack servers. Meanwhile, no group has taken responsibility for the attack, which is rather strange considering that usually these kind of activities are performed as a publicity stunt. Attacking Dyn was a particularly evil masterstroke considering that the company runs domain name servers or DNS.
These domain name servers are used to direct users to the right places on the web and Dyn is no exception. By attacking Dyn, a whole bunch of websites can be prevented from loading properly. Which is what happened after Dyn was attacked. Thankfully though, the situation was brought under control soon after. The company has said that its engineers are tackling the issue and that an update will be posted once the issue was totally mitigated.
The infamous incident acquires even greater significance by having taken place around the time when US has accused Russia of hacking the Democratic National Committee and promised retaliation.
