Internet Outage: Massive DNS DDoS Attack Takes Out Several Popular Websites

We Are Change

Early Friday morning, in the U.S. citizens awoke to large scale internet outage a massive DNS DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on DyN a company that provides DNS for a number of popular websites. Subsequently this resulted in the temporary take-down of several popular websites on the east coast including –

Twitter, Etsy, Github, Soundcloud, Spotify, Heroku, Pagerduty, Shopify, intercom, Netflix according to The Hacker news.

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If you were to visit any of the above sites early this morning you would have been greeted with a “could not connect” error. No it’s not just you the whole of the east coast was experiencing problems

“This attack is mainly impacting US East and is impacting Managed DNS customer in this region,” DYN, wrote at 8:45am EST. “Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.”

DNS servers, convert the domain names of websites into computer-digits or IP addresses (like 58.188.221.232) which is google.  But with a DNS company like Dyn under attack, the system doesn’t work to translate IP addresses into domain names like www.twitter.com or www.netflix.com. Essentially without DNS lookup to decipher those string of numbers the internet doesn’t work. There are 13 root DNS servers that if all attacked could bring the Internet to a stand still.

The attack appears to have started around 7am ET and appears to have affected a huge chunk of the East Coast and some parts of the Midwest. Level3, which monitors internet activity, shows the extent of the outage. The outage has since been rectified and the websites that were affected seem to be resolving the Ip address and working again as of 9 a.m. EST.

“Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we 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.” DYN, wrote.

No one or group has taken responsibility for the attack but I seem to remember a discussion from a certain hacker a few months back who was working on what he called

“the worlds largest DNS DDoS cannon” in a private conversation. They also came to me and said that they would be attacking Twitter and avenging me for Twitters alleged shadow banning of my twitter account An0nKn0wledge.

With that discussion in back of my memory it seems logical that this individual or individuals may have possibly been behind the attack and that this may have just been a test of power.  We will keep you updated on this developing story as more information becomes available.

 

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