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Someone successfully shut down many websites Friday, attacking a crucial part of the internet that has been made more vulnerable due to an Obama administration decision to surrender American control, according to experts. Websites like Twitter, Spotify, Reddit and many others were not working for a large portion of U.S. citizens Friday, after unknown hackers breached the servers of Dyn, a major domain name system (DNS) host. Essentially the “yellow pages” of online addresses, DNS is the technical network that converts web address names into numbers. “We began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure....

Chinese firm admits its hacked DVRs, cameras were behind Friday's massive DDOS attack Botnets created from the Mirai malware were involved in Friday's cyber attack. Michael Kan - IDG News Oct 23, 2016 A Chinese electronics component manufacturer says its products inadvertently played a role in a massive cyberattack that disrupted major internet sites in the U.S. on Friday. Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology, a vendor behind DVRs and internet-connected cameras, said on Sunday that security vulnerabilities involving weak default passwords in its products were partly to blame. According to security researchers, malware known as Mirai has been taking advantage of these vulnerabilities...

Default passwords on devices from the digital video recorder in your living room to the security camera in your office threaten the stability of the internet, as hackers build vast networks of “Internet of Things” devices to bombard websites with traffic. The attack on Dyn, a domain name service provider, that disrupted access to high-profile sites such as Twitter, Spotify and the New York Times on Friday, highlighted the risks posed by the billions of devices connected to the internet with little or no cyber security protections. Unidentified hackers took over tens of millions of devices using malicious software called...

Hackers used internet-connected home devices, such as CCTV cameras and printers, to attack popular websites on Friday, security analysts say. Twitter, Spotify, and Reddit were among the sites taken offline on Friday. Each uses a company called Dyn, which was the target of the attack, to direct users to its website. Security analysts now believe the attack used the "internet of things" - web-connected home devices - to launch the assault.

FOX News: The widespread cyber attack yesterday was "perpetrated by a government." Yeah. Our own.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is reportedly investigating. The attack raised fears that this could be a trial run for an attempt at a major disruption of the U.S. presidential election. While many of the websites affected by the first attack, which hit the East Coast, are back up, sites hosted on the West Coast, including Twitter and Recode, have been hit, and were unavailable for many as of 11 a.m. Friday. As of 11 a.m., Dyn’s online update about its response to the attacks said the company was continuing to “investigate and mitigate.” The outages appear to have resulted...

A thread yesterday talked about how the jihadis were going to attack websites of those who stood in the way of jihad. FR was mentioned. This morning, I'm starting to get a lot of "502" errors here. If I find the link from yesterday I'll post it below. Anyone else having this problem?

SCOTLAND YARD has uncovered evidence that Al-Qaeda has been plotting to bring down the internet in Britain, causing chaos to business and the London Stock Exchange. In a series of raids, detectives have recovered computer files revealing that terrorist suspects had targeted a high-security internet “hub” in London. The facility, in Docklands, houses the channel through which almost every bit of information on the internet passes in or out of Britain. The suspects, who were arrested, had targeted the headquarters of Telehouse Europe, which houses Europe’s biggest “web hotel”, containing dozens of “servers” , the boxes which contain the information...

SAN FRANCISCO, May 9 - The incident seemed alarming enough: a breach of a Cisco Systems network in which an intruder seized programming instructions for many of the computers that control the flow of the Internet. Now federal officials and computer security investigators have acknowledged that the Cisco break-in last year was only part of a more extensive operation - involving a single intruder or a small band, apparently based in Europe - in which thousands of computer systems were similarly penetrated. Investigators in the United States and Europe say they have spent almost a year pursuing the case involving...