Internet service appears to stablize after waves of cyber attacks

Internet service appears to stablize after waves of cyber attacks

WATCH Full Video : Full Video : least two successive waves of online attacks blocked multiple major websites Friday, at times making it impossible for many users on the East Coast to access Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit and other sites.

The first attacks appear to have begun around 7:10 a.m. Friday, then resolved towards 9:30 a.m., but then a fresh wave began.

The cause was a large-scale distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) against Internet performance company Dyn that blocked user access to many popular sites. Such DDoS attacks have a long history online but may be increasing in numbers with the recent release of easy-to-use computer code to create them.

Denial of service attacks occur when someone, or a group of people, floods a particular site or service with large amounts of fake traffic in an attempt to overwhelm the system and take it offline.

.

Effects felt nationwide

Dyn reported the sites going down at around 11:10 a.m. UTC, or roughly 7:10 a.m. ET, posting on its website that it "began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure."

In an update posted at 8:45 a.m. ET, the company confirmed the attack, noting 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 this issue."

By 2:52 p.m. ET, Dyn posted that the service monitoring issues had been resolved and that its engineers continued to investigate and mitigate the attacks on its infrastructure.

Amazon, whose web service AWS hosts many of the web's popular destinations including Netflix, also reported East Coast issues around the same time. In an update posted at 9:36 a.m. ET it said that it had "been resolved and the service is operating normally."

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the Department of Homeland Security was “monitoring the situation" but that “at this point I don’t have any information about who may be responsible for this malicious activity.”

Who and why unknown

It was unclear Friday who was behind the attacks and whether they were focused on Dyn specifically or on the many companies that it provides services to.

The attack is “consistent with record-setting sized cyberattacks seen in the last few weeks,” said Carl Herberger, vice president of security at security company Radware.

He noted that easy-to-use computer code that allows even amateurs to create to create robot networks, so-called 'bot nets', to attack websites was released by hackers earlier this month

USA TODAY

Internet of Things comes back to bite us as hackers spread botnet code

Others worried the attack could be from a nation-state rather than simply a single individual seeking to wreak havoc.

“This is not a script kiddie,” said Markus Jakobsson, chief scientist at Agari, a computer security firm based in San Mateo, Calif. By that he meant unskilled hackers who use others' programs, or scripts, to hack into systems because they lack the expertise to write their own software.

“This not just an instant job, this is something that was probably worked on for weeks if not for months by really competent people,” he said.

Disruption

A post on Hacker News first identified the attack and named the sites that were affected. Several sites, including Spotify and GitHub, took to Twitter this morning to post status updates once the social network was back online.

Follow

Spotify Status ✔ @SpotifyStatus

Uh oh, we’re having some issues right now and investigating. We’ll keep you updated!

1:59 PM - 21 Oct 2016

25 25 Retweets 39 39 likes

Twitter users similarly took to the service to keep lists of which sites were down and comment on the situation. The term DDoS quickly vaulted to among the top of the site's list of "Trending Topics" in the United States.

"DDoS attack this morning takes out Reddit, Twitter & Spotify," wrote user @Anubis8. "Work productivity increases by 300%."

Follow

Emmy Caitlin @emmycaitlin

Anyone else having a whole lot of trouble with sites loading properly this morning? Paypal is down, Twitter was down, Netflix half loading.

1:36 PM - 21 Oct 2016

6 6 Retweets 5 5 likes

"Anyone else having a whole lot of trouble with sites loading properly this morning?," tweeted Emmy Caitlin. "Paypal is down, Twitter was down, Netflix half loading."

Follow

Ben duPont @BenjaminduPont

Looks like Twitter is down again.....now 1 billion people won't know what I had for breakfast.

1:29 PM - 21 Oct 2016

12 12 Retweets 27 27 likes

How the attack works