The website you have dialed is not in service at this time
by Tom Sullivan
Photo by Marcin Wichary via Wikimedia Commons.
PLEASE STAND BY. The Internet is experiencing technical difficulties.
According to reports, a number of popular sites went down Friday, victims of a massive cyberattack. Reuters reports:
Hackers unleashed a complex attack on the internet through common devices like webcams and digital recorders and cut access to some of the world’s best known websites on Friday, a stunning breach of global internet stability.
The attacks struck Twitter, Paypal, Spotify and other customers of an infrastructure company in New Hampshire called Dyn, which acts as a switchboard for internet traffic.
The attackers used hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices that had previously been infected with a malicious code that allowed them to cause outages that began in the Eastern United States and then spread to other parts of the country and Europe.
The FBI is investigating:
Obama administration officials have determined the outages were the result of a malicious attack, according to a federal law enforcement official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments. Investigators have come to a preliminary conclusion as to who carried them out, but are not planning to make that public for now, the official said.
Atlantic has more:
If it seems like there have been more of these sorts of outages lately, it’s because there have. “Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them,” the security technologist Bruce Schneier wrote in a blog post in September. “Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they’re used to seeing. They last longer. They’re more sophisticated. And they look like probing.”
“Probing” refers to a specially calibrated kind of attack, one that’s designed to take advantage of an individual website’s precise security weaknesses. “We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses,” Schneier wrote.
Why not aliens? Probing used to have another connotation that involved alien attackers. In the Star Trek universe, unexpected probing usually provoked “Shields up!” and “Red Alert!” To date, the response in the meatspace seems less decisive. (Does Patrick Stewart need another project?)
Your brain may no longer be in control
It seems our little techie devices are easily assimilated and turned against us. Security researcher Brian Krebs has had his blog taken down before. On Friday, he wrote:
The size of these DDoS attacks has increased so much lately thanks largely to the broad availability of tools for compromising and leveraging the collective firepower of so-called Internet of Things devices — poorly secured Internet-based security cameras, digital video recorders (DVRs) and Internet routers. Last month, a hacker by the name of Anna_Senpai released the source code for Mirai, a crime machine that enslaves IoT devices for use in large DDoS attacks. The 620 Gbps attack that hit my site last month was launched by a botnet built on Mirai, for example.
That day Chinese and Russian hackers made America's smart refrigerators rise up against their owners.
[Yes, I know it wasn't fridges]— emptywheel (@emptywheel) October 22, 2016
Is there a BorgWarner in your hybrid vehicle?