How to explain Oct 21st Internet Giant Cyberattack

Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, airbnb and many other US websites were down or hard to access on October 21st. This Cyberattack happened as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host company.

Dyn admitted right away that they had being hit with three waves of attacks. Dyn thus told CNBC the attack is “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions IP addresses at the same time.”

Dyn posted the following update on its website: “Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we 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.”

To understand how one DDoS attack could take out so many websites, you have to understand how Domain Name Servers (DNS) work. Indeed, they act as the Internet’s phone book: they facilitate your request to go to a specific webpage and make sure you are taken to the right location. If the DNS provider handling requests for Twitter is down, you will not have access to Twitter. Some websites might be coming back for some users, but it doesn’t look like the problem is fully resolved.

The FBI and Homeland Security have starting investigating October 21st Giant Cyber Attack.

Here’s a list of websites which have been affected by this major hacking:

• ActBlue
• Airbnb
• Basecamp
• Big cartel
• Box
• Business Insider
• CNN
• Etsy
• Github
• Grubhub
• HBO Now
• com (iHeartRadio)
• Imgur
• Intercom
• Okta
• PayPal
• Pinterest
• Playstation Network
• Recode
• Reddit
• Seamless
• Spotify
• Squarespace Customer Sites
• Starbucks rewards/gift cards
• The Verge
• Twillo
• Twitter
• Weebly
• Wix Customer Sites
• Yammer
• Yelp
• Zoho CRM
• Credit Karma
• Eventbrite
• Netflix
• Fox News
• Disqus
• Shopify
• Soundcloud
• ConstantContact
• New York Times
• Wikia
• BBC
• Elder Scrolls Online
• Eve Online
• PagerDuty
• Kayak
• Speed Test
• Freshbooks
• Braintree
• Blue Host
• Qualtrics
• SBNation
• IndieGoGo
• Fortune
• Survey Monkey
• Paragon Game
• Runescape

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