Many of us may have presumed that the biggest, most used websites were somehow impervious to hackers and online threats. We were reminded twice on Friday morning that certainly isn’t the case.
Internet users on the east coast woke up this morning to find that many of their most-visited sites were down as a result of an attack on Dyn, a company that manages DNS (Domain Name System) servers for many of the most familiar sites on the internet.
Though the effects seem varied among the sites – some were rendered completely unresponsive, others were slowed or offered limited features – they were all hit by the same “DDoS” attacks. DDoS stands for “distributed denial of service,” which occurs after sites are bombarded with orchestrated requests in a short period, rendering the sites slowed or entirely useless.
This heat map from Level3, which monitors internet usage, shows the extent of the outages early on, when internet users were predominately on the east coast due to the early hour:
An incomplete list of the sites affected can be viewed here, but a quick inventory offers up some of the biggest names on the internet across all verticals, though it seems to affecting largely U.S. internet users. It includes:
- Kayak
- eBay
- HBOGo
- Verizon
- YouTube
- Comcast
- AT&T
- Gmail
- Amazon
- Souncloud
- Sprint
- Outlook
- Netflix
The attack started at 7 AM ET, and at 9:45 Dyn issued a statement saying that services have been restored, although users are still reporting outages and lag.
Another DDoS attack took place at 12:47 PM ET, with many sites, such as Twitter, still down from the attacks.
As of yet, it’s not clear where the DDoS effort came from or what party or parties are responsible for it. Nor is it clear if we’ve seen the end of the attack. The White House has announced that Homeland Security has an investigation underway to find those behind the attacks.
