Denial of Service Attack Hits Websites, Knocking Out Access--Update
October 21 2016 - 10:32AM
Dow Jones News
By Drew FitzGerald
Several websites including Twitter and Tumblr were unreachable
during an extended period for many internet users Friday following
an online attack.
Web technology provider Dyn said its domain name system, or DNS,
service was subject to a massive distributed denial of service
attack.
Denial of service attacks can knock websites offline by flooding
them with junk data, blocking the way for legitimate users. Dyn's
DNS services are a key part of the digital supply chain that allow
web addresses -- Twitter.com, for instance -- to take users to the
infrastructure that hosts them.
"We began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our
Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure" beginning at 7:10 a.m. Eastern time
on Friday, the Web service said on its status website.
Dyn said its services were back up by around 9:20 a.m. ET. The
company didn't disclose the source of the attack.
Security experts say denial of service attacks have grown more
powerful over the past year. A sustained assault on the website of
security researcher Brian Krebs last month broke records partly
because the network that launched it used hundreds of thousands of
connected cameras, digital video recorders and other "smart"
devices, according to website defender Akamai Technologies Inc.
Amazon.com Inc. also said it had found the root cause of DNS
problems affecting its East Coast cloud customers and resolved the
issue, though it didn't disclose the cause. Amazon had said it was
looking into an elevated number of errors related to accessing its
cloud services in a main East Coast server hub due to DNS issues.
Amazon Web Services runs a broad array of websites.
Amazon said the problems occurred between 7:31 a.m. and 9:10
a.m. Eastern time.
Cloud services provider Heroku Inc. also said it was seeing
"widespread" DNS issues related to a denial of service attacks
against one of its DNS providers.
--Austen Hufford contributed to this article
Write to Drew FitzGerald at andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 21, 2016 10:17 ET (14:17 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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