By Aaron Miller-
Major websites could not be accessed across wide sections of the United States on Friday. A company that manages crucial parts of the internet’s infrastructure said it was under cyber attack.
Problems affecting several websites, included Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Reddit, Etsy, SoundCloud and The New York Times.
The company, called Dyn, has servers that monitor and reroute internet traffic. It began experiencing what security experts called a distributed denial-of-service attack just after 7 a.m. Reports that many sites were inaccessible started on the East Coast, but spread westward in three waves as the day went by. The disruption bore all the hall- marks of an orchestrated cyber attack.
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Far more disturbing is the fact the cyber attack appears to have relied on hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices like cameras, baby monitors and home routers that have been infected, with software that enables hackers to command them to flood servers with overwhelming traffic.
CYBER WARNING
Internet experts have long warned that the number of devices being linked to the internet would present an enormous security issue Internet company, Dyn, said it had fended off the assault by 9:30 a.m. but by 11:52 a.m, it was again under attack. After fending off the second wave of attacks, Dyn said at 5 p.m. that it was again facing a flood of traffic.
Denial attacks are potentially very harmful to individual servers because a swamp of internet traffic is injected until it causes a crash of the internet system.
These kind of attacks not very common, but are becoming more common and sophisticated these days. Yesterday, many websites in the Uk were affected by a wave of cyber attacks, not as widespread as that which occurred in the United States.The UK Telegraph was among those affected by the cyber attack, and the eye of media.com may also have been temporarily affected. There was a temporary loss of service, lasting only by fifteen minutes, but occurring more than a few times in the day. The eye of media.com’s admin said the provider, Go daddy, saw no reason why the server was down .
BLAME
It will be no surprise if Russia is blamed for these wave of cyber attacks at a tense time as this. However, without concrete evidence, it is probably best we avoid that line of thinking. Perhaps, further research should go into developing stronger ways of protecting our servers from cyber attacks, though if the source of the attacks can be definitely be determined, then it should be done, with the method of discovery made public. The cyber attackers could well be a few crazy computer wizards, with bad intentions who have nothing better to do with their time. Or it may be a lone weirdo trying to be disruptive for the sake of it.