San Francisco—Cyber attacks pounded the underpinnings of the internet Friday, crippling Twitter, Netflix and other major websites with the help of once-dumb devices made smart with online connections.
Waves of attacks incapacitated a crucial piece of internet infrastructure, hampering or outright blocking access to popular online venues.
“When I see something like this, I have to think state actor,” said Carbon Black national security strategist Eric O’Neill, a former “spy hunter” on the FBI counter-intelligence force.
“This is not some hacker sitting in his basement typing away on a keyboard.”
The attack was said to put a troubling new spin on an old hacker attack known as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), where millions of devices in the fast-growing internet of things took part in the cyber onslaught.
Armies of computers infected with malicious code are typically used in DDoS attacks intended to overwhelm targets with simultaneous online requests.
Hacker software referred to as Mirai that takes control of IoT devices was evidently linked to the attack, with the broad range of devices making requests helping get past Dyn defenses.
“We are seeing attacks coming from a number of different locations,” Level 3 Communications internet services company chief security officer Dale Drew said in a video posted online.
“We are seeing attacks coming from an internet-of-things botnet that we identified called Mirai also involved in this attack.”
Possible probe
Heavyweight cyber attacks that seem to yield trouble but no apparent payoff could be probing defenses to refine tactics for use on high value targets such as utilities or transportation systems, according to O’Neill and other computer defense specialists.
The attack could also have been meant as a message from a foreign power, cyber security analysts told AFP.
The onslaught commanded the attention of top US security agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.
“DHS and the FBI are aware and are investigating all potential causes” of the outages, a spokeswoman said.
The outages left internet users unable to post messages, shop, watch videos and play games online for parts of the day.
Dynamic Network Services Inc, which manages internet traffic, said around 1100 GMT that its infrastructure had been hit by a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack in the eastern part of the United States.
The initial attack was resolved within about two hours but the company, known as Dyn, was slammed with a second DDoS wave.
DDoS attacks involve flooding websites with more traffic than they can handle, making them difficult to access or taking them offline entirely.
Domain name servers are a crucial element of internet infrastructure, converting numbered Internet Protocol addresses into the domain names that allow users to connect to internet sites.
The DDoS attack hit what is akin to a directory assistance service used to route online traffic to the right addresses, meaning that even though networks such as Level 3 were running normally they couldn’t be reached.
A map published by the website downdetector.com showed the effect was felt across the US and into Europe.
“The critical point is how fragile our internet is that these attacks can happen,” O’Neill said.