Our favorite websites and applications, Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, and a huge list of other companies went down or were generally inaccessible a few days ago. The reason this was happening was hackers unleashed a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host that a ton of big name companies use. It could have been prevented with blockchain technology and Borderless.Tech says they have a solution already up and running on the Expanse blockchain.
What essentially caused the outage, was a large botnet of connected "things". Mostly cameras and stuff connected to the internet that had very limited security measures in place. A computer programmer created a bot that trolled the internet looking for IoT devices using default or easy to crack passwords so that the bot could commandeer the device for nefarious purposes. During the attack he aimed his commandeered devices toward the Dyn servers and down they came.
So how could attacking one company's servers cause a rippling effect of inaccessibility? Well first you have to understand exactly what DNS servers do. DNS (domain name server) is basically a giant phonebook of domain listings that direct easy to remember names like "facebook.com" to the hard to remember address of servers. The problem with having a centralized list of names and addresses, is if that list ever goes down, then we can't connect to the website we want to connect to unless we know the hard to remember address of the server. I'm sure Dyn has tons of fault tolerance in place but what they didn't have was ENOUGH fault tolerance in place.
faviconLead developer of Expanse and CEO of Borderless Corp says
"Had Dyn been utelizing the Borderless.tech DNS (distributed dns) product they could have completely mitigated the effects of the DDoS with the power of the blockchain. Blockchains are peer 2 peer distributed ledgers absolutely built for maximum fault tolerance. If Dyn had all their domain name records stored in a blockchain then the ddos's effective would have been greatly reduced."
Christopher told us that the Borderless DNS and many other Borderless products will be available in Jan 2017.
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