Cyber attacks disrupts major websites Asylum rwxr-xr-x 0 4:42 PM

Filename	Cyber attacks disrupts major websites
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Author	Asylum
Date and Time	4:42 PM
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Recent web attacks on many popular sites like Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, SoundCloud, PayPal have caused widespread online disruption. The attacks seemed to have been focused on Dyn, one of the companies that run the internet’s domain name system Dynamic Network Services (DNS).

The services were subjected to two massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Friday. Distributed denial-of-service attacks can knock websites offline by flooding them with junk data, blocking the way for legitimate users.

In a statement, Dyn Chief Strategy Officer Kyle York said, “the attack came from “tens of millions” of addresses on machines that had been infected with malicious software code. The code—known as Mirai—takes advantage of a weakness in internet-connected devices and forms them into a collection of attacking machines, called a “botnet.”

Mr. York said the attacks focused on different computers in Dyn’s network through the day.

Dyn was investigating both the attacks that caused similar problems to the outages. The firm said it was still trying to determine how the attack led to the outage.

The incidents mark a change in tactics as DDoS attacks are more typically aimed at a single site.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, according to researchers.

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