Vampire2020
My spell check doesn’t even have DDoS,DNS or IoT in it.
DDoS is basically like sending 10,000 people to an apple store at the same time. Your customer service is gonna suck. It overwhelms a server that is providing some service so it is too slow to use or gets shut down. A possible Russian hacker team used IoT’s to launch a DDoS against the US right before the Presidential election. Any device that is connected to the internet can be use to send a message to a server and as we exponentially connect things like refrigerators or cameras or printers or “things” the bigger the opportunity. They targeted DNS servers that is a foundational component for the entire Internet. At the time, I wrote that if it were a Country behind it, it was no different than a pre-emtive strike no different than bombing a strategic data center or military asset. In another words, a war – cyberwar. The timing also was very suspicious given Trump’s links with Russian leaders. I guessed that it was a distraction for manipulating the US election systems.
Updates: Wired Magazine recently published an article disclosing Court records that link the software’s original authors and the immensely popular game minecraft.
The decision to open source Mirai also led to its most high-profile
attack. The FBI says Jha, White, and Dalton were not responsible for
last October’s DDoS of the domain name server Dyn, a critical piece of
internet infrastructure that helps web browsers translate written
addresses, like Wired.com, into
specific numbered IP addresses online. (The FBI declined to comment on
the Dyn investigation; there have been no arrests publicly reported in
that case.)‘I’d be more surprised sometimes if I didn’t see a Minecraft connection in a DDoS case.’
Doug Klein, FBI
The Dyn attack paralyzed millions of computer users, slowing or stopping internet connections up and down the East Coast and interrupting service across North America and parts of Europe to major sites like Amazon, Netflix, Paypal, and Reddit. Dyn later announced
that it might never be able to calculate the full weight of the assault
it faced: “There have been some reports of a magnitude in the 1.2 Tbps
range; at this time we are unable to verify that claim.”Justin
Paine, the director of trust and safety for Cloudflare, one of the
industry’s leading DDoS mitigation companies, says that the Dyn attack
by Mirai immediately got the attention of engineers across the internet.
“When Mirai really came on the scene, the people who run the internet
behind the scenes, we all came together,” he says “We all realized that
this isn’t something that just affects my company or my network—thiscould put the entire internet at risk. Dyn affected the entireinternet.”
Just as aside, I took a break from any news or reading while taking care of other maters and I only read this December 2017 article today. It is crazy how fast things are moving and that will have big ramifications for everyone. For this old guy, it means get out of the way.