This Large scale cyberattack on Dyn took place on October 21, 2016, leaving millions of people unable to enter the most popular websites in the world. Twitter, Spotify, Amazon, Reddit, Tumblr, PayPal, and even important media websites such as ‘The New York Times’, ‘Financial Times’ or CNN, among others, suffered a series of successive computer attacks that left them K.O. during hours.
This problem mainly affected users from the eastern United States, although after a while it affected other locations as well, but how could a cyberattack affect so many sites on the Web?
How could a cyberattack be transformed on a large scale attack
The target of the cyberattack was the Internet provider Dyn, which manages and redirects traffic on the Internet. It suffered a denial of service (DDoS) attack on its Internet domain system (DNS), the Internet domain service is the system that allows users to type the names of the pages, for example www.truxgoservers.com, instead of binary identifiers associated with the equipment connected to the Network. This company, located in the USA, has among its clients the pages that were suspended, assuming that this was the reason that said pages mentioned were left with limited access.
A DDoS attack is when criminals use a large number of hacked or misconfigured systems to flood a site with junk traffic until it can no longer receive legitimate visitors.
According to the company, the first investigations indicate that the attack came from devices known as the ‘Internet of Things’ (digital interconnection of everyday objects with the Internet), such as DVRs, printers and other devices connected to the Internet that in fact we have already seen that these tools can be a great vulnerability in our systems due to the lack of security. According to the Gartner company, in 2020 there will be approximately 26,000 million connected devices in the world.
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