Trending News

An Angry Gamer’s Grudged Hands On IoT Leads To The Biggest DDoS Attack Of 2016

By Sarah | Update Date: Nov 22, 2016 07:01 AM EST

The moth of October 2016 has been a month of hacks in the US. With the FriendFinder network hack down, sporting the list of big hacks if the biggest DDoS attack on a DNS services company called DYN. The massive attack had propelled more than one terabit of data per second, crashing DYN servers, which in turn led to temporary outrage in several famous websites like Twitter, Netflix and Reddit. Even after serious efforts on mitigating the attack, the websites were taken down.

According to reports from Hacked.com, a cryptographer had called it before it happened, as someone was testing the ability of internet services companies to secure themselves. Although the hack did not cause a network-wide outage, it, however, crashed the internet partially in the United States.

An Angry Gamer's Grudge on PSN

It was reported that a grudged gamer who wanted to take down Sony's PlayStation Network had been responsible for the attack on DDoS.

Dale Drew, CSO of Level 3 Communications says, "We believe that in the case of Dyn, the relatively unsophisticated attacker sought to take offline a gaming site with which it had a personal grudge and rented time on the IoT botnet to accomplish this." Though Drew had not mentioned that it was Sony's PlayStation Network (PSN), sources from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) have found that it was the PSN.

IoT is a major cause

Hence, it is apparently the vengeance of one gamer that had the ability to take down a few major websites in the world. Though it is surprising to think that the biggest DDoS hack was pulled off by a single person, it is notable that the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought made websites and networks susceptible to hacker attacks as this that create entire armies by using of botnets, which in DYN's case, is the Mirai botnet.

Not so expensive trick to pull-out

Reports from the Forbes magazine said that the angry gamer had found hackers on a dark net criminal forum that was providing access to enormous armies of IoT devices infected with the Mirai botnet for money. The gamer had paid $7500 to acquire temporary access to this dangerous cyber weapon. Then, in an urge to take revenge he had pulled his trick out on DYN.

The attack on DYN is one of the biggest DDoS hacks that the world has faced, next to the hack on OVH, a French hosting provider. The world record was at over 1 terabit per second, slightly above the DDoS attack which recently affected the internet.

© 2023 Counsel & Heal All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

Join the Conversation

Real Time Analytics