This past Friday's DDoS attack...

[Tsutarja]

I'm sure many of you tech folks (and anyone else here that watches and/or reads the news) heard about the large DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack that occurred last week, affecting a lot of major websites that users around the world visit.

On Friday, Dyn, who handles a large chunk of the world's web traffic was the target of the attack. Some of their major clients include: Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, Netflix, Etsy, and GitHub. You may recognize Dyn for their DynDNS service, in which they offer domains (like nameofdomain.dyndns.org) for users to have a hostname to link with instead of an IP address.

The company did issue a statement on the matter, and what went down on their end:
https://dyn.com/blog/dyn-statement-on-10212016-ddos-attack/

This is a fairly significant attack as well, because the attack involved usage of tens of millions of IP addresses across the world, all of which can simply link back to the Internet of things.

So, what do you guys think? Did anyone actually have any issues connecting to said sites mentioned above?

 

[0]

I thought it was interesting, and it shows a real security threat concerning unnecessary devices connected to the internet (why?) that are default unsecured.


Funny, too, they released the source code so if you wanted, you could build your own botnet.

 

[Esper]

More security for internet of things devices seem necessary. It seems there aren't really any guidelines or regulations with these devices. I've also heard that lots of these items are made relatively on the cheap so there's little built-in security available even if you want to pay for it.

Seems like this is going to be a wake-up call for a lot people. One is tempted to suspect that was the purpose of the attack in the first place.

 

[Tsutarja]

You know, one of my professors talked about the attack as well and mentioned that a Chinese manufacturer who makes DVRs apparently came forward that devices made by them were involved in the attacks, because many of their devices contained compromised IP addresses.