Earlier today, unknown hackers carried out a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyber attack against leading American Internet Performance Management (IPM) company Dyn, Inc. The company first detected the attack at 11:10 a.m. UTC.
The assault targeted Dyn’s Domain Service Name (DNS) infrastructure, which in turn affected sites like Twitter, Etsy, Github, SoundCloud, Spotify, and the company’s website.
First news of these attack appeared on HackerNews and on the Dyn official status page, which is updating in real time with new information about the hack. All of the affected sites are now back online.
Who is behind the Dyn DDoS attack?
According to an article published hours ago by Brian Krebs on his official blog, the hackers concentrated the attack on Dyn’s network around the East Coast. European users of these sites might have experienced fewer problems for this reason.
Dyn has not disclosed the source of the attack, nor any important hacker group has come forward to claim responsibility.
However, an article at Politico stated Anonymous’ recent #OpHotPockets might be the reason behind the siege. #OpHotPockets is the group response to Julian Assange’s forced isolation from the Internet.
Brian Kerbs reported that the attack took place just hours after Dyn’ Director of Internet Analysis Doug Madory gave a talk in Texas about DDoS attacks, he added that Dyn’s website is famous for publishing articles on massive cyber attacks.
The investigation and counterattack started in the early hours of the morning. The company restored its services to normal at around 1:20 p.m. UTC. At 3:52 p.m., the disruption returned, and it was still ongoing as of 6:23 p.m. UTC when DYN its last status update.
Dyn’s status page is keeping track of the attack
DynDNS Company provides DNS infrastructure for Twitter, Etsy, Github, SoundCloud, Spotify, among others. Basically, it gives these companies an infrastructure or “online headquarters.” Without it, they would not have a presence on the net.
By directing the attack to Dyn’s DNS infrastructure, hackers made it impossible for users to access all of these sites without targeting them individually.
Since no organization has taken credit for the attack, it is impossible to tell whether the hack targetted DynDNS Company, or the company was just the means to an end.
At 20:37 UTC, the company updated its website status reporting the engineers were still investigating and mitigating a series of attacks that targetted the company’s DNS structure.
Source: Dyn, Inc