Cyber Attacks Interrupt Access to Several Websites

Cyber attacks disrupted access to dozens of websites on Friday, blocking some users from accessing Twitter, Spotify and PayPal. The attack targeted Dyn, a slightly known internet infrastructure company.

Dyn said the outages that started in the Eastern United States spread to other parts of the country and overseas. The company, whose customers comprise some of the world’s most commonly visited websites, said it did not know who was responsible for the attack.

The outages were sporadic, making it difficult to identify all the victims. However, technology news site Gizmodo named a number of sites that the attack impinged on. They included Mashable, HBO Now, CNN, the New York Times, Yelp, People.com, and the Wall Street Journal.

Attacks were emanating from tens of millions of Internet-connected devices such as printers, thermostats, and webcams, Dyn said. They were infected with malicious software that converts them into “bots” that are capable of massive distributed denial of service attacks.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released an alert last week concerning this powerful new approach. The agency remarked its concern about the potential for fresh attacks following code for malware used in these attacks was posted on the internet.

Dyn said on Friday that it was fending off the third major wave of attacks. The attacks were getting harder to fight since they were being launched from sites scattered across the globe.

“The complexity of the attacks is what’s making it very challenging for us,” said Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategy officer.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said they were investigating the case.

The disruptions happened at a time of unparalleled concerns about the cyber threat in the United States, where hackers have violated political organizations and election agencies.

Dyn said an earlier attack, which interrupted operations for about two hours, had been resolved. However, a second attack a few hours later caused further disruptions.

The outage was restricted to the Eastern United States, Dyn said early on Friday. But Amazon later reported that the incident was affecting users in Western Europe. Some users in London could not access twitter and some news sites late on Friday evening.

PayPal Holdings Inc said that the outage inhibited some customers in “certain regions” from doing payments. It said that its networks had not been hacked and apologized to customers for the inconvenience.

Amazon.com Inc’s web services division also reported a related outage but was resolved early Friday afternoon, the company said

Dyn is a provider of services for managing domain name servers (DNS), which function as switchboards connecting internet traffic. DNS servers direct requests to access sites that are transmitted through them to computers that host websites. The company is based in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Dyn said it was still investigating how the attack led to the outage but that its first priority was restoring service.

Attacking a large DNS provider can produce substantial disruptions because such companies are responsible for redirecting huge amounts of internet traffic.

 

 

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