Friday may as well be a historic day in US history. Many
of the world's most popular websites were inaccessible
across several parts of the United States on Friday as a
result of the wave of cyber attacks on a company that acts as a
switchboard/middleman for the
internet. This company is called Dyn and it processes large volumes of internet traffic
Access to websites such as Paypal,
Spotify, Twitter and other customers of Dyn were affected. Other
websites that were attacked and affected included top names like CNN,
New York Times, AirBnB, Reddit, HBO and many more sites.
"Dyn acts as a middle man and directs users to different websites by routing traffic from server to server in a complex way.
According to Al jazeera's correspondent, the attackers used hundreds of thousands of
internet-connected devices that had been previously infected with a
malicious code which allows them to cause outages. "This type of attack is known as a distributed denial of
service attack (DDoS)," explained by Al jazeera's correspondent. "They used affected
computers to fire requests at the servers of Dyn simultaneously and
essentially overwhelmed it."
Security researchers have previously raised concerns that such connected devices, sometimes referred to as the Internet of Things, lack proper security.
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