Earlier today, a significant portion of the American East Coast populace encountered hindrances when attempting to access several online platforms, including Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Reddit, and Amazon. This disruption was due to a large scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack striking at the heart of internet performance giant, Dyn.
Information on Dyn’s website reveals that at around 7:10AM ET/12 Noon Nigerian time, the company commenced monitoring and mitigation efforts in response to a DDoS attack against their Managed DNS infrastructure.
By roughly two hours later, Dyn reported that service had returned to normal. And as of this writing, it appears all previously impacted digital services are now operating without issue.
For those unfamiliar with the term, DDoS stands for distributed denial of service attack. This refers to an attack on a network or server with the goal of denying users access to allocated resources. To distribute this attack, multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system. This is typically accomplished using botnets – applications that continually place heavy demands on bandwidth – thereby denying legitimate visitors access to service to/from the website. These attacks are malicious and can be sometimes motivated by ransom demands.
If you suspect that you’re under such an attack, there are a few steps you can take:
- First and foremost, remain calm. Panic often leads to rash decisions.
- Get in touch with your hosting provider if you have a VPS or related services.
- At times, the best tactic can be to wait for the attack to subside. Large scale attacks require considerable resources to maintain, and at some point, the attackers may withdraw.
- For larger websites that suspect an organized and powerful source behind the attack, engagement with security firms offering anti-DDoS services may be a wise choice.
Unless targeted specifically, most DDoS attacks are short-lived. If the attack was extensive, the aftermath may persist longer, but eventually, normal operations will resume. As seen this evening when Twitter went down while other websites, including TechBooky, remained unaffected, it’s an intermittent reality of our digital world.
To conclude, it’s important to understand that this particular attack was not carried out directly against the affected companies. Therefore, users need not panic or worry about the safety of their data on these platforms, as it resides on the servers of these companies, and not on Dyn, an internet performance company that helps businesses monitor and control their online infrastructure.