Today a group of hackers were able to successfully interrupt internet service and access to a number of popular websites for thousands of people in the U.S. They were able to disrupt sites like Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, Paypal, and more. The White House responded to the disruption and attack, claiming that it was the work of a malicious hacker group, however this has not been verified yet. But one group, New World Hackers, has claimed responsibility through Twitter.
The hackers (or hacker) launched numerous waves of distributed denial-of-service attacks and that is how they were able to overwhelm certain machines that were targeted by them to receive junk traffic data; coming from tens of millions of different machines that were connected to the internet. It is claimed that even people in Europe were also affected and not able to access certain sites. The attacks are described as being extremely complex and it is assumed that the hackers were moving around the world with each of their attacks. The East Coast is said to have been targeted first, followed by offshore and then the West Coast.
Other sites that were also affected were Amazon, HBO, Gifthub, SoundCloud, and others. Thus far the Department of Homeland Security has said that it is investigating all potential causes of the attack. It has also been alleged that Wikileaks believes that its own supporters could have been responsible for the attack. Instead of going after sites individually, the hackers targeted Dyn which is a domain name system provider, and their attack resulted in servers being unable to carryout requests because of the sudden spike in activity.
Pics:
DownDetector.com
Twitter
Fortune
sources:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/technology/ct-internet-down-ddos-attack-20161021-story.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3859500/Widespread-internet-havoc-major-attack-takes-websites-offline-Spotify-Twitter-sites-suffer-outages.html
http://thenextweb.com/security/2016/10/22/hackers-broke-the-internet-today-heres-how/