A cyber-attack massive disrupts of many Internet sites in the United States – The World

For a little more than two hours, access to Twitter, Spotify, eBay, Reddit, Airbnb and many in the media was impossible on the east Coast.

Several big-name Internet, including Twitter, Spotify and eBay were severely disrupted on Friday 21 October in the United States by a cyber attack directed against a service provider.

For a little more than two hours, access to these sites, but also at several media outlets (CNN, New York Times, Boston Globe, Financial Times, The Guardian), Reddit or Airbnb was impossible on the east Coast.

According to some information sites, the service of video on demand, Netflix, HBO, and the online payment service Paypal have also been disturbed by this vast cyber-attack that potentially affected millions of internet users. The attack, which started around 13: 10 (hour of France) and lasted two hours, took the form of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Contacted by AFP, Twitter, and Airbnb have confirmed temporary problems of access to their services, but provided by mid-day everything was back to normal.

Surge in computer attacks

more and more widespread, this kind of cyber-attack is to render a server unavailable by overloading query or in reaping its resources to exhaustion, often from a network of machines zombies themselves hacked and used without the knowledge of their owners (” botnet “).

The target on Friday was the company Dyn, which redirects the flow from the Internet to hosters and translated in any way the names of sites into IP addresses, announced this last. the ” This morning, the 21st of October, Dyn has been the victim of a huge DDoS attack on [its] infrastructure of DNS [Domain name system, domain name system] on the east Coast of the United States “, said Scott Hilton, executive vice president of Dyn.

This cyber-attack comes a resurgence of attacks and other acts of piracy in the United States and in other industrialized countries. Yahoo has recently admitted to having been the victim of an extensive attack that compromised the personal data of 500 million users. Several attacks have also targeted the financial sector and some banks, leading the industrialized countries of the G7 to adopt, in mid-October, a series of protection rules.

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