Note from the Publisher: We're going to let the smart people explain Friday's massive internet outage to you. Being on the East Coast in Atlanta, we experienced major issues all day on Friday. My husband streams CNBC and that was affected most of the day, as were several other news outlets according to the article below. As a customer of the firm affected, Dyn, fintech Paypal was also affected, and that brings up the important concern of cybersecurity as we convert to more online payment endeavors. We've also seen malicious code affect the digital currency ethereum and even more recently, bitcoin. There's no moral to the story here as a takeaway, and we won't jump into any conspiracy theories. (Was it Russia? Was it Anonymous seeking revenge for Julian Assange's internet restriction?) This is simply a sobering reality check on the vulnerabilities of transacting business on the web, and a reminder of how quickly life can change when that access is shut down.
"(Friday) was a particularly tough day to enjoy internet browsing. A huge online disruption bothered users of popular sites like Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, PayPal, and Pinterest. Even news outlets weren’t exempt, with the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and even WIRED experiencing the same disruption.
So what happened?
It was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack targeting Dyn, one of the big internet infrastructure companies that run the web’s domain name system (DNS). The first bout of attacks began at around 7 am ET and lasted for two hours. A second wave hit around noon and a third round began at 4 pm ET.
The attacks disrupted traffic to Dyn’s internet directory servers, initially affecting mostly the East Coast and later on spread to the Western Seabord, as well. Dyn servers were flooded with malicious requests from millions of IP addresses, causing the system to halt — like if a human was asked too many questions without enough time to respond. It’s a “very sophisticated and complex attack,” says the New Hampshire-based company. The attacks were also felt on a mitigated scale in Asia."
Read Full Article at Futurism