DDoS Attack Takes Down Big Internet Sites

DDoS Attack Takes Down Big Internet Sites

Prevent Cyber AttacksDNS provider Dyn.com is currently under heavy DDoS attack which has affected many well known brands across the Internet including Amazon, Netflix, Reddit, Twitter, NetFlix, CABizHost, Paypal and many others.

This may affect your site if you use them for DNS or if you use any service, like Paypal, that uses DynDNS.

The larger providers seem to have worked quite quickly to mitigate this attack, but it is ongoing so it’s important that you’re aware of it and carefully monitor your website during this time.

The cause was a large-scale distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) against New Hampshire-based Internet performance company Dyn, which manages website domains and routes internet traffic, experienced two distributed denial of service attacks on its DNS servers. A DDoS attack is an attempt to flood a website with so much traffic that it impairs normal service. The attacks made it difficult for users to access to many popular sites beginning at 7:10 a.m. ET and continued throughout the day.

Sacramento affected by Cyber AttackInitially, outages were primarily impacting the internet and various companies on the East Coast, but by midday Friday, October 21, people on the west Coast and in Europe were reporting wide-spread outages as well.

“We’ve never really seen anything this targeted, that impacts such a huge number sites,” said David Jones, director of sales engineering at software IT company Dynatrace. “Typically DDoS attacks are targeted at individual servers and sites. DNS is like a phone book: this is like someone is attacking the phone company and burning all the phone books at the same time.”

At this point no one has claimed responsibility for the attack yet. A government official said the U.S. is “looking at all possible scenarios including possible cyber activity.”

If you have a WordPress website, check this out. (It’s safe, it’s one of my sites.)

 

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