Posted on 10/21/2016 1:17:56 PM PDT by Hojczyk
This morning a ton of websites and services, including Spotify and Twitter, were unreachable because of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, a major DNS provider. Details of how the attack happened remain vague, but one thing seems certain. Our internet is frightfully fragile in the face of increasingly sophisticated hacks.
Some think the attack was a political conspiracy, like an attempt to take down the internet so that people wouldn’t be able to read the leaked Clinton emails on Wikileaks. Others think it’s the usual Russian assault. No matter who did it, we should expect incidents like this to get worse in the future. While DDoS attacks used to be a pretty weak threat, we’re entering a new era.
If hackers are more easily able to amass extensive DDoS botnets, that means the internet as we know it becomes more vulnerable. Attacking major internet infrastructure like Dyn has always been a possibility, but if it becomes easier than ever to launch huge DDoS attacks, that means we might be seeing some of our favorite sites have more downtime than usual. These attacks could extend to other major pieces of internet infrastructure, causing even more widespread outages.
This could be the beginning of a very bleak future. If hackers are able to take down the internet at will, what happens next? It’s unclear how long it could take for the folks at Dyn to fix this problem, or if they will ever be able to solve the problem of being hit with a huge DDoS attack. But this new breed of DDoS attacks is a scary problem no matter how you look at it.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
Perhaps they were not as top of the line as the salesmasn said they were.
Yeah Biden threatening Russia with a cyber war. Maybe he should have shut the he$$ up.
Hey, Putin, how about disabling the EBT and Snap cards for a week or so? Would be very entertaining!
Easy fix, unplug the ChiComs and Russkies from the interwebs and “Bob’s your uncle” ....
We have no idea what kind of troubles we'll see in the future.
I use a small hosting company on the East Coast that it very big on being secure. They did have to fight off one DDOS attack in recent months but did a pretty good job of holding them back.
apparently this is embedded-device malware
So you can thank the geniuses that brought us the “smart toaster” and the like.
Unfortunately, legitimate businesses were affected too.
I work for an internet retailer. Our shipping and supply management tool is in the cloud and affiliated with DYS. There were two times today where we couldn’t access our shipping info. That shuts us down. Paypal went down too and that really puts a dent in multitudes of companies.
Luckily today it was only two times for us and each time it was back up within an hour. But a sustained DoS could really cripple the business world.
Cripple the Internet and let slip the dogs of war.
sigh - At least EBT cards are not effected by this vicious attack. /s
Billions of teenagers and adults will not be able to get on FaceButt!..............so there is an upside...............
A month or three..............
Only idiots would believe the Russians would want Trump to win.
The IoT sounds great on paper but I think it’s a bad idea.
“Our shipping and supply management tool is in the cloud”
From Karl Denninger, who ran a computer company and did his own security for it:
https://www.market-ticker.org/
“Public cloud computing, that is, computers at a remote location you do not own but lease space on, which have a hypervisor and clients running under it where you do not have complete, 100% control of said hypervisor are not secure.
If you have allegedly “encrypted” data there that is accessed, modified and used on said machine then the key to decrypt said data must also be on the machine and unprotected so it can be used. If that is the case it can be trivially stolen since the hypervisor has complete access to all of the memory and disk resources of the client process and once stolen any pretense of security vanishes like a fart in the wind.
This is the lesson of the Wikileaks “Podesta” and related hacks. It is not that Russia was involved (or not), it is not whether the “hack” was criminal, it is nothing of the sort. It is that many of these people had their data (email in this case) on a public cloud environment and said environment was trivially broken into and the data stolen within minutes of being targeted.”
WikiLeaks – Verified account @wikileaks
Mr. Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing. We ask supporters to stop taking down the US internet. You proved your point.
Alive and well where? Me are paranoid.
So we are all in for online voting?
Advertisers ruined the Internet.
Thanks for the info.
Although this stopped us from continuing business, there is nothing in our shipping data that anyone might want, unless they cared who had bought what, or how many of a certain product we have in our inventory. All our financial transactions, etc. are through a secure portal. We don’t store credit card info.
But I’m going to pass your info onto our IT Dept.
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