[MAJOR UPDATE ADDED ABOVE VIDEO AT THE BOTTOM OF THE ARTICLE]
The U.S. east coast suffered a massive Internet attack this morning, October 21, 2016, causing sweeping outages across a number of platforms including Google, Paypal, Netflix, Twitter, Spotify and a host of others.
The apparent cause according to Techcrunch this was a DDOS attack against DNS provider Dyn. DDoS is a type of DOS attack where multiple compromised systems, which are often infected with a Trojan, are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.
Other sites experiencing issues include Box, Boston Globe, New York Times, Github, Airbnb, Reddit, Freshbooks, Heroku and Vox Media properties. Users accessing these sites might have more or less success depending on where they’re located, as some European and Asian users seem not to be encountering these issues.
Dyn says that the DDOS attack affecting its customers is mostly impacting the U.S. East coast, and specifically Managed DNS customers. Engineers are working on “mitigating” the issue, according the DNS provider.
Down Detector outage maps from a number of the aforementioned sites, show the affected area is the east coast as shown in the screen shots of those maps below, giving a visual of how widespread the damage has been throughout the morning.
This morning, October 21, Dyn received a global DDoS attack on our Managed DNS infrastructure in the east coast of the United States. DNS traffic resolved from east coast name server locations are experiencing a service degradation or intermittent interruption during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.
Upon recognition, active mitigation protocols were initiated and have been working to resolve the issues.
Customers with questions or concerns are encouraged to check our status page for updates and reach out to our Technical Support Team.
Readers in the affected areas of the east may also have had issues accessing the comment section at ANP, as most of the morning the only way I could access the comment section was directly through the Disqus moderation dashboard because the comments would not show on individual articles and when attempting to hit reply via the email notifications, the following message occurred.
BOTTOM LINE
While there is no word yet on who is behind these attacks against the east coast of the U.S., it does hammer home why stories about how the CIA is planning cyber attacks against Russia, which was reported by NBC News just a week ago, can lead to retaliation, which could end up far worse than what those living on the east coast that were affected by this mornings attack, experienced.
In the day and age of the internet, cyber attacks can be just as devastating and dangerous as physical attacks.
[UPDATE] DYN says service has been restored.
[UPDATE #2] Cyber attacks have begun again but this time the Down Detector screen shots all show outages on the east AND west coast... some sample screencaps below:
