A who benefits from the crime ? The cyber attack conducted in several waves, has seriously disrupted the functioning of the Internet Friday in the United States, depriving millions of people of access to many sites, such as Twitter, Spotify, Amazon or eBay, but also other giants such as Reddit, Airbnb, Netflix, and the sites of several media outlets (CNN, New York Times, Boston Globe, Financial Times, The Guardian…). The department of homeland security (DHS) and the FBI in the United States have immediately launched an investigation “into all potential causes.”
This type attack ” denial of service “, which is to saturate a connection service to make it inaccessible, has been massive, with millions of Internet addresses that are connected at the same time. According to the specialists, it is one of the largest attacks ever seen. This attack has specifically targeted the services of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the company, Dyn.
The DNS is a kind of referral : when an internet user types a domain name into their browser, it is DNS server, which directs them automatically to the desired website. To saturate this DNS, hackers have had to resort to objects that are connected (webcams, digital recorders, etc.). Several weeks ago, hundreds of thousands of these objects have been infected by a malicious code that nobody recognized. At the time, the pirates have unleashed their attack, multiplying the connection requests and saturating the network in the eastern United States and Texas before touching the west of the country.
A State is behind the attack ?
To observers, the pirates must have significant means. “It is an attack on very elaborate. Every time we the neutralize, they adapt,” said Kyle Owen, an officer of Dyn. For the time being, impossible to say, according to the investigators, which is at the origin of this attack.
For the time being, several theses are in circulation. The Wikileaks website, which published thousands of emails from the campaign manager to Hillary Clinton, was believed to detect in this attack a mark of support for its founder Julian Assange refuge in the embassy of Ecuador in London, and whose access to the Internet has been recently cut. “Julian Assange is still alive, and Wikileaks continues to publish. We ask our supporters to stop block the internet american. You have been heard,” tweeted the site. Others see it as the leg of the hacker group Anonymous who tweeted: “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. We do not need water. Let the motherfucker burn.”
According to James Scott, an expert in cybercrime at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology similar attacks have been carried out in December 2015 by cyber-jihadists to help 18, 000 mobile devices.
For his part, the guru of security Bruce Schneier the United States believes that a country is likely to be behind the attack. Looks obviously to Russia or China who might have interest to destabilize the u.s. economy. According to him, this attack could be only a test before the offensive, is more important. Among the potential targets to paralyze : whole sectors of the economy such as the finance, oil or electricity…
More than 80% of oil companies have seen an increase in the number of cyber-attacks successful in 2015. By the year 2018, nearly $ 1.87 billion should be invested by the oil companies to protect themselves against this threat.
A structure which is too fragile
This attack also reveals that the structure of Internet networks could be a colossus with feet of clay to the extent that the connected objects will multiply in all the areas (autonomous car, health items, houses connected)…
“the Internet continues to be based on protocols and an infrastructure designed before cyber security was a problem,” said one of these specialists. The Internet is increasingly dependent on cloud services which concentrate the information and the hacking of one of these points may immediately cause a chain reaction.
The French are afraid of the scams
In the meantime, this attack against Dyn will keep the wind of anxiety blows over the Internet. In France, the fear of scams, hacks and the use of personal data by companies has never been as important according to a study conducted by Harris Interactive for the Association for commerce and services online (Acsel) and the Caisse des dépôts.
63% of the respondents say and do pasavoir confidence in the use of the Internet. The recent scandal of Yahoo, which has revealed a hack of 500 million accounts in September, or the warning given to Cdiscount by the Cnil for its protection, very lightweight, credit card information, and are not there to reassure them.
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