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Major DDoS Attack Causes US Outages on Twitter, Reddit And Other Websites

By Debaleen Sengupta | Update Date: Nov 24, 2016 09:10 AM EST

DDoS attacks aren't uncommon, just like the DDoS attack on Internet performance management company Dyn, that took place late October, caused outages for a number of its clients, namely Twitter, Reddit, SoundCloud and Spotify.

The attack that took place was normalized by 9:20 AM Eastern Time. This attack caused a number of Dyn clients to take a hit in their loading times, which were delayed significantly.

Some news sites have described this as an attack to shut down half the internet for users on the East Coast. Dyn's client list in big and in that list the customers About.com, CNBC. Etsy, RedHat and Zillow can be found.

Of late, the DDoS attacks on servers have been ever increasing. KrebsOnSecurity was temporarily brought down by a DDoS attack, just like OVH, a France-based hosting company which was twice as potent as the attack on KrebsOnSecurity.

When asked about the Dyn DDoS attack, Krebs noted that the DDoS mitigation firms did not consider the size of the attacks increasingly so quickly overnight. And now these firms are scrambling to secure far greater capacity to handle much larger attacks concurrently.

Internet of Things might have a role to play in the ever increasing large scale DDoS attacks, experts think. Researchers at Akamai Technologies found out about a 12-year-old vulnerability in the OpenSSH security utilities suite. IoT should be renamed to Internet of Unpatchable Things, as the researchers noted, as these networks are full of openings and weak security.

The large scale DDoS attacks are increasing thanks to the software tools available at any hacker's market (or a black market for software) that are being used to compromise and leverage these weak links in the IoT framework.

The most affected devices in the IoT framework seems to be digitally connected cameras, video recorders and network routers. These devices are grossly insecure and vulnerable to attacks as they are often factory set with the same passwords for a series of device models.

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