Good day all, this is the Angry Systems Administrator. There seems to have been a problem with the Internet on the East coast of the United States this morning.
The apparent cause of the issue was a Distributed Denial of Service attack against DYN, a major Domain Name Services and DNS provider. They’re also headquartered about 20 minutes away from Anger Central. The outage took down a number of major sites including Twitter. I personally noticed some issues with Indeed.com. The outage appears to have been corrected. Here are some of the details from Mashable:
Sites across the internet had problems on Friday morning following a cyberattack on a major internet management company. On Friday morning, Dyn — a company that hosts domain name systems — announced it has been the subject of a cyberattack that caused major problems for numerous websites. People reported issues with Twitter, Spotify, SoundCloud, Vox Media sites, Airbnb and numerous other sites.
Writing on its website, Dyn said that starting at about 7 a.m. EST, the company “began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.”
The source of the attack Friday was not immediately clear.
Rumors that the NSA did this in order to prevent any further embarrassing information on Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party from Wikileaks cannot be confirmed at this time.
I have used Dyn’s services in the past, until it became a bit pricey. (They had free DNS services) They are a local company, and both the Angry Webmaster and I have looked into applying for positions there. Unfortunately, they didn’t have anything that would be a good fit for either of us. (They are primarily a Linux shop. While both the Angry Webmaster and I can work in a Linux environment, neither one of us is at the level Dyn needs)
This attack was probably caused by some jerks testing out a new botnet. I expect the Obama Administration to blame the Russians, however, this is not something they would be interested in doing. Dyn has already fixed the issue and did so within an hour of discovering the attack. Saying this, considering the way the Obama Administration is blaming the Russians for the Wikileaks document dumps on the Clinton campaign and the Democrat party. I fully expect them to blame this on them as well.
Taking down the DNS system isn’t the easiest thing to do. You can take down a company such as Dyn, for a short time, but if you already have the dns information cached, or use other dns servers, then you can generally get around the outages. Good work to the Dyn systems and networking people for getting their network back online in short order.
FYI
Dear Dyn; if you are looking for help, I know a couple of people…
Thank you
~The Angry Systems Administrator~
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