Apparently, Twitter, CNN, Reddit, Pay pal…and several others are experiencing problems now. Has the war heated up between the Russian hackers now? :rolleyes:
Is there a DOS attack underway?
CNN is ignoring the problem too? Anyone else having problems accessing the internet?
There’s been a distributed denial of service attack on a major DNS (Domain Name Server) host. It’s not just you.
It’s not just you, but I’m in the Seattle area and Twitter is back up now, hooray.
Someone I follow on Facebook posted this:
Phillip DeFranco:
it’s gotta be the Russians helping Trump. They did the impossible, he can’t use his Twitter account.
The only problems I’ve had are on live-streaming sports sites – which are themselves of Russian origin.
What is the motivation for launching a massive ddos attack like this? Just for sport, to prove that you can? Is there any benefit or profit to those who do it?
All sorts of reasons.
Just plain old anger. There are a lot of people on the Internet completely overwhelmed with anger. They do things like this just to “get back” at specific or general targets. E.g., a security researcher reporting on such attacks got his website DDoSed a couple weeks ago. His web host kicked him off since they couldn’t handle it. Luckily, Google stepped in to host it.
As part of a larger scheme. Messing up a chunk of the Internet might provide a cover for other activity. E;.g., there have been several major “probes” against Internet infrastructure in recent weeks. Some suspect that this is to test out how the major players respond. A full blown major whoa-daddy attack is expected soon. (Making Friday’s look like nothing.) Perhaps timed for the election. If everybody is too busy putting out fires, they might not notice other things the attackers are doing.
Just to prove they can do it. The source code for one of these DDoS attacks was recently released online. Friday’s attacks used that. Expect more of this nonsense.
His name is Brian Krebs. He’s been fighting the internet trolls and script kiddies for years. Krebs says a security firm told him the same code that took down his site last month was the same code that did the damage last Friday. That source code has since been released into the wild so DDoS attacks this large could come from anywhere now.
One ‘L’.