Cyber Attacks On East Coast Shut Down Popular Sites

Twitter: One Of The Affected Sites

Cyber attacks on the EAST COAST of the U.S. has the DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY "monitoring" a series of repeated attacks on Internet service, causing hours-long disruption of popular sites like TWITTER, AMAZON, REDDIT and SPOTIFY for many users, ABC NEWS reports. Attacks continued throughout the day and spread to the WEST COAST.

DYN, INC.., a firm that provides hosting services for the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), posted online this afternoon that its engineers are working to "mitigate" a second detected distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, approximately five hours after the first one.

The DNS is like the phone book for the Internet. When a user types an internet address into a browser, the DNS converts the name into a numeric IP address and sends the user to its destination. An attack on DDoS blasts its target with so many data requests, it eventually paralyzes it. 

The first attack on DYN appeared at have shut down some of the Internet's most popular websites. Within a few hours, DYN had restored service until the next wave appeared.  

Last week, the DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY's U.S. COMPUTER EMERGENCY READINESS TEAM warned users of a "heightened DDoS threat" as connected devices are being used as part of botnets to flood target systems. The last few weeks have seen record-setting DDoS attacks, DHS said, and source code for one major type of attack was recently released online, meaning anyone with a little know-how might be able to command an army of robot networks, so-called "bot nets."

It was unclear if the hacks are focused on DYN specifically or companies that it provides services to, said security company RADWARE VP/Security CARL HERBERGER. 

The attack is “consistent with record-setting sized cyberattacks seen in the last few weeks,” he said.

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