Here’s A List Of Possible Suspects In Today’s DDoS Attacks – The US Government Is Now Investigating It Too

Who could be responsible for today’s attacks on major US websites like Twitter, Amazon, Netflix and Spotify which also has a strong base in the United States? It’s no secret that the US government has accused Russia of hacking into emails of the Democratic Party in the US with the aim of giving the other party an electoral advantage. They have since denied this though but the attacks keep coming and there’s even stronger evidence that these attacks are indeed coming from inside the Russian government. So could it be Russia trying to cripple major internet companies?

The aim of this article is to try and narrow it to the likeliest culprit as possible.

Russia

Like I said above, Russia has been accused of using names like the fancy bears to attack government and private accounts of citizens of western world countries. Their most recent attack was on the World Anti-Doping Agency database with the aim of publishing the health records of American athletes. Now many suspect Russia because many of its athletes were accused of doping and eventually disqualified. They insisted that their athletes were clean and didn’t use performance enhancing drugs. So you might see why they might need to show the world that US athletes were also using performance enhancing drugs too.

There is also the political attacks where they have been accused of backing WikiLeaks with the intention of discrediting one candidate, Hillary Clinton. They published her emails and those of her staff daily even with hashtags like #imwithher which is something Hillary Clinton supporters use on Twitter rand Instagram to show their support. Again you can see why it keeps looking as if Russia which has denied these allegations may be complicit. Why not the fancy bears you ask. Well it because the scale of their hacking is sophisticated and can only be coming from a state with such capacities as Russia according to the Americans. So there you go, Russia may be the number one suspect.

North Korea

North Korea had in anger over the Sony movie, the interview hacked into Sony database thereby exposing private information of staff and others. This caused Sony to pull the movie from theaters last year after several threats from North Korea. The US President Barack Obama had called Sony’s decision a mistake and said the US was capable of defending its corporations. Then the unexpected happened, North Korea’s internet went down for hours with the US not admitting that it did it in response to the attacks on Sony. Since then North Korea has threatened to blow up the United States and its allies in the region namely South Korea and Japan. So yeah, North Korea is a suspect.

China

The US has been accusing China of economic espionage for years and they have in return denied it and accused the US of the same. But in light of the accusations and counter accusations, the US and Chinese leaders met last year in Washington DC to this effect. They announced in a news conference that neither government would support or conduct cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property. Since then the attacks from the Chinese side are said to have reduced drastically. In a New York Times article earlier this year, they found out that cyber-attacks on American interest by the Chinese have been largely curbed. So if you ask me, China shouldn’t be the first place to look.

Individuals

Seeing as the attack was concentrated on just a region in the US, it could also mean that a smaller group of individuals could be responsible. If I were a state, why would I just cut of service to users in a region and why not the entire country. Maybe the tried and failed or didn’t do it altogether.

There are still sporadic attacks against some of these domains but Dyn says it is resolving it all. Now the US government has decided to investigate it and all we have to do is wait while the investigators and tech guys in the affected companies do their job.