Twitter, Amazon And Netflix Suffered DDoS Attack Earlier Today. Here’s What To Do If You Think You’re Under Such Attack

Some residents in the American East Coast experienced difficulties accessing sites like Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Reddit and even Amazon earlier in the day. Well it was due to a large scale distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on internet performance company Dyn.

The reported on their site earlier that at around 7:10AM ET/12 Noon Nigerian time that it “began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure.”

But about 2 hour later, they said it was all normal.

It looks like it all back now.

For those who don’t know what DDoS mean, like we defined above, it simply stands for distributed denial of service attack. The denial of service stands for an attack on a network/ server with the intention to deny users of allocated resources.  To make this distributed, you would have to have multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system. This is usually done using botnets (robot) applications that continue to place heavy demands on bandwidth thereby denying legitimate visitor access to service to/from the website. These kinds of attacks are maiclious and in some cases are done for a ransom.

But when if you suspect that this could be happening to you,

• The first step is not to panic
• Call your host if you have a VPS or whatever service you are on
• Sometimes you just wait for the attack to die out because as you may know, it takes resources to actually pull off such large scale attacks so at some point, the attackers would have to drop it
• If you are a big website and think this could be coming from an organized and powerful source, then you may need to engage the services of security firms who have anti-DDoS services.

But frankly speaking, unless you are a website of interest, the attack shouldn’t take forever.

At some point this evening, it looked like Twitter was down as other websites including TechBooky were loading but not Twitter. It’s finally back on life should go back to normal.

Let me conclude by saying this attack wasn’t carried out directly on the listed companies, so you shouldn’t panic and be worried for your data as they reside on the servers of those companies. Dyn is an internet performance company that help companies control and monitor their online infrastructure.