friends of assange take down large portions of US internet [Archive]

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cheka.

21st October 2016, 02:19 PM

cheka.

21st October 2016, 02:21 PM

https://www.cnet.com/news/internet-outage-dyn-ddos-attack-twitter-spotify/

Across the US, people are either screaming at their phones and computers, or to going little crazy trying to figure out which of their favorite websites is still working.

Friday morning at 7 a.m. ET, folks on the East Coast discovered sites like Twitter, Spotify and software code-management service GitHub were knocked for a loop. Hackers had flooded Dyn, one of the biggest internet management companies in the country, with junk traffic -- effectively shutting services and websites throughout the region.

"Some AWS customers experienced errors establishing connectivity to a small number of AWS endpoints hosted in the Northern Virginia," Amazon acknowledged Friday, and said the problem was resolved.

The East Coast outages eased after two hours, then returned with a vengeance at midday. Outages now affect areas across the US and parts of Europe.

Twitter, for example, said it continues to feel the effects. The earlier issues have resurfaced & some people may still be having trouble accessing Twitter," the company said in a statement. "We're working on it!"

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Friday it was looking into the outages. "We're aware and are investigating all potential causes," said Gillian M. Christensen, deputy press secretary of the the department.
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Spotify didn't respond to a request for comment.

Hackers used what's known as distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) -- conscripted hordes of internet-connected devices like digital video recorders, routers and digital cameras into a botnet -- to cripple Dyn's servers.

The tactic has been around since the dawn of the modern internet, but have been getting more powerful. Last month, the website of cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs was hit with 620 gigabits per second of traffic, one of the largest DDoS attacks on record. Until now, attacks on sites as large and popular as Twitter have been rare.

"Given the drastic increase lately in the size and scope of DDoS attacks, DNS providers [like Dyn] are scrambling to increase bandwidth capacity to withstand the latest attacks," said Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security for cybersecurity company SentinelOne. "They are attractive targets for large-scale DDoS attacks."

Having just about anything connected to the internet doesn't help. Where before the bad guys had to rope in thousands of computers to launch their attacks, they now have potentially millions of smart TVs, refrigerators, home routers, security cameras -- even baby monitors at their disposal.

Given how easy these devices tend to be for hackers to compromise, researchers like Shankar Somasundaram of Symantec think DDoS attacks will just get worse."

"There will be more of these attacks," he said.

https://cnet2.cbsistatic.com/img/eA5GEYRn9zKAvThXVr1IeMq75bU=/fit-in/570x0/2016/10/21/e21c608d-4fe7-4d3f-8ac1-c01e9ea5f177/outage-map-update-1130am.png

cheka.

21st October 2016, 02:30 PM

the epicenter is an outfit called 'dyn'

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/internet-disrupted-dyn-hit-by-ddos-cyberattack/

A wave of reports of problems accessing many popular websites came after the servers at a major internet management firm were hit by several cyberattack.

New Hampshire-based Dyn said its server infrastructure suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which occurs when a system is overwhelmed by malicious electronic traffic.

At 4:30 p.m., Dyn told CNBC that a third attack was underway. Dyn told CNBC the attacks are “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions IP addresses at same time.”

In a statement provided to CBS News, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was aware of the attack and is “investigating all potential causes.” DHS will take the lead on the investigation, working with the FBI.

The scale of the attack led to suspicions that it might be state sponsored, but ZDNet security editor Zack Whittaker said the evidence is not yet clear. “It may or may not have been sponsored by some state-sponsored actor, at this point it’s simply too early to tell,” he told CBS News.

DDoS attacks are nothing new, but Whittaker said they’ve been getting “worse and worse” recently, and this one “must be off the charts.”

Dyn issued a series of statements about the service disruption early Friday local time, tweeting that as of 9:20 a.m. ET, “services have been restored to normal.”

However, the company detected another wave of DNS attacks just before noon and acknowledged that the problem continued. “We are continuing to mitigate a DDoS against our Managed DNS network,” it said.

A little after 3 p.m., Dyn reported progress: “Our advanced service monitoring issue is currently resolved. We are still investigating and mitigating the attacks on our infrastructure.”

The level of disruption caused was hard to gauge, but Dyn provides internet traffic optimization to some of the biggest names on the web, including Twitter, Netflix, Airbnb, Spotify, Visa and others, and users of many sites were reporting problems.

Jason Read, the founder of Gartner Inc.-owned internet performance monitoring firm CloudHarmony, said his company tracked a half-hour-long disruption early Friday in which roughly one in two end users would have found it impossible to access various websites from the East Coast.

Read said that Dyn provides services to some 6 percent of America’s Fortune 500 companies, meaning a big potential for disruption.

“Because they host some major properties it impacted quite a few users,” he said.

crimethink

21st October 2016, 02:31 PM

Earlier thread:

http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?93023-Russian-warning-shot

crimethink

21st October 2016, 02:32 PM

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-21/wikileaks-reveals-heavily-armed-police-gathering-outside-ecuadorian-embassy-london

Mr. Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing. We ask supporters to stop taking down the US internet. You proved your point. pic.twitter.com/XVch196xyL

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 21, 2016

Headline: WikiLeaks Tweets "Heavily Armed Police" Outside Ecuadorian Embassy; Says Assange Is Still Alive

Like I said here: http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?93023-Russian-warning-shot&p=863051&viewfull=1#post863051

We can rule out a group of metros calling themselves "Anonymous" or any other loosely organized group using their own pizza-delivery money.

Any attempt to pin this on "Wikileaks supporters" is part of the Washington Criminals' agenda.