This is an alert: Internet sites went down by hackers. That’s because early this morning, hackers used distributed denial of service (DDoS). They attacked Dyn Inc. services. But?as of 1:20 pm UTC time, 9:20 am Eastern Time, Dyn states their services are normal again.
Dyn is a major domain name system (DNS) hosts. Hence, the attack caused a Level 3 outage. According to outage maps, attack hit the Northeast US hard. Also, the outage hit some of the US Southwest hard. Consequently, the websites affected include CNN, Business Insider, HBO Now, Paypal, People.com, Playstation Network, Twitter,?and Reddit. They attacked many more websites as well.
Also, the attack hit lots of news media sites, like Boston Globe and New York Times. You see, DNS is like the phone line system of the Internet. Since they process your request for a website, they make sure you go to the right website. For example, you type yahoo.com on your Web browser. The DNS makes sure you get to Yahoo, not some other website. But when the DNS, aka the phone lines go down, there’s no way the server can read, or process, your request. This happened many, many websites during this outage.
But the scariest thing isn’t the outage itself. We should be thankful it was resolved when it was. If the outage went on two days longer, what would the result be? Let’s face it: Even a few hours can be too long. In July 2015, a major airline went down for several hours. Therefore, flights went down, backups piled up and tempers flared. It only took a few hours for that situation to spiral out of control. So what if this outage lasted longer than it did? Furthermore, what if these hackers went after DNS hosts that affected our food supply, our fuel/oil/electricity, or sanitation, or our military defense? And what if that lasts for days and days. I’m not trying to sound like a fear monger. But with all this talk of cyber attacks, we must be realistic and aware. What will it take to prevent this potential disaster?