Over on the East Coast of the States, Friday morning started off more stressful than one would like.

At 7:10 AM ET, Dyn, a New Hampshire-based company that monitors and routes Internet traffic, was the victim of a massive DDoS attack.

It took the company 11 hours to restore its service.

During that time, some users in the East Coast region were unable to access massive sites like Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit, PayPal and others.

Here are  the details, thanks to USA Today:

At 6:17 p.m. ET Friday, Dyn updated its website to say it had resolved the large-scale distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) and service had been restored.

DDoS attacks flood servers with so many fake requests for information that they cannot respond to real ones, often crashing under the barrage. It’s unclear who orchestrated the attack.

[Read more about what a DDoS attack is, HERE.]

Troubling to security experts was that the attackers relied on Mirai, an easy-to-use program that allows even unskilled hackers to take over online devices and use them to launch DDoS attacks. The software uses malware from phishing emails to first infect a computer or home network, then spreads to everything on it, taking over DVRs, cable set-top boxes, routers and even Internet-connected cameras used by stores and businesses for surveillance.

These devices are in turn used to create a robot network, or botnet, to send the millions of messages that knocks the out victims’ computer systems.

The source code for Mirai was released on the so-called dark web, sites that operate as a sort of online underground for hackers, at the beginning of the month. The release led some security experts to suggest it would soon be widely used by hackers. That appears to have happened in this case.

So a whole lot of vulnerable, innocent devices were able to take down a domain registration service provider? Eish. Although it was labelled as a “very sophisticated and complex attack” by the company, obviously some Twitter users saw the light:

But this is the worst thing about the attack: it could have been avoided. Warnings signs about the dire effect of cybercrime have been on the rise all year – and anyone can be a target.

From protecting personal devices – which make up the Internet of things – to using an individualised traffic-managing service, there are ways and means of protecting both yourself and your company. One local company that knows all about it and insists on it is NEWORDER. Give them a call, provide a breakdown of what you have and they will sort you out one time.

[source:thedailybeast&cnet&usatoday]