This morning, a number of major sites were not working, or having significant issues. This was due to a pretty large DDoS attack being put on Dyn. For those that are unaware of what Dyn is, it’s a large domain name server for many websites around the world. This morning, big sites like Twitter, reddit, The New York Times, Spotify, Vox Media, and many others were down for some in the US. Dyn was able to mitigate the attacks around 9AM EST, but around 1PM EST they started up again, and got even worse. There’s no word yet on when these attacks will be mitigated, or if there will be a third round.
According to Reuters, the US government has decided to start investigating these DDoS attacks to see if they are a “criminal act”. The US Department of Homeland Security is “investigating all potential causes” for this attack. At this time, it’s unclear whether this is a criminal act or not especially since the government just started their investigation, but it’s one of the bigger DDoS attacks in recent memory.
For those that may be unaware of what DDoS actually is, it stands for Distributed Denial of Service, and is an attempt to make websites unavailable. This is done by sending so many pings to it, that the server can’t keep up. DDoS attackers will target a range of websites that are used everyday. Like bank websites, news websites and even social media sites. DDoS attacks happen daily for most sites, especially the more popular ones, but they don’t always get taken offline, nor do they usually get taken offline for this long. This is an attack that we haven’t seen before, which is what has prompted the government to look into these attacks and see what is going on.
At the time of writing this, Twitter, reddit, Spotify, and many popular news outlets remain down, or at least having trouble showing content. The only sites that seem to be unaffected are Google sites right now. Hopefully Dyn can get everything squared away, but right now the Internet is definitely an issue.