Twitter, Tumblr among Firms Affected by New Wave of Attacks
It’s another day and another massive cyberattack.
This time, the targets of these attacks were some of the biggest social media companies, with web sites including Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and Spotify.
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According to The Wall Street Journal, these sites were inaccessible for many Internet users in the U.S. on Friday, October 21.
Web-technology provider Dynamic Network Services Inc., known as Dyn, said its domain name system (DNS) service was subject to a massive distributed denial-of-service attack starting at 7:10 a.m. on Friday. After the first attack was resolved, Dyn reported a second one around midday. (Source: “Cyberattack Knocks Out Access to Websites,” The Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2016).
The Department of Homeland Security was “monitoring” this massive attack, according to U.S. media reports, but so far it wasn’t clear who is behind these interruptions.
Cyber security is becoming a major issue for both the corporate world and governments. In recent weeks, the U.S. government blamed Russian-sponsored hackers for the breach of the Democratic Party’s e-mail servers, disclosing materials containing details of Hillary Clinton’s private speeches delivered to corporate sponsors.
Similarly, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDQA:YHOO) revealed last month that hackers got access to about 500 million subscribers’ private information in 2014, including their passwords and dates of births. The disclosure was so big that it has forced Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ), which agreed to acquire Yahoo this summer, to review its deal, calling this disclosure “material.”
“We’re still digging into root cause, but ultimately it was limited to the East Coast of the U.S.,” Dyn spokesman Adam Coughlin was cited as saying in the report. (Source: Ibid.)
Denial-of-service attacks, like the one that targeted social media sites on Friday, can flood web sites with junk data, blocking access to legitimate users. Dyn’s DNS services are a key part of the digital supply chain that allows web addresses to take users to the infrastructure that hosts them. Dyn didn’t disclose who was behind the attack, according to the report from The Wall Street Journal.
Airbnb Inc. was another company that saw its web site “intermittently available” for a short period on Friday morning, spokesman Nick Shapiro said, adding that the company restored the accessibility quickly. (Source: Ibid.)
