Major Web sites affected by a huge cyber attack – The Figaro

Several major sites, including Twitter, Spotify, eBay, as well as those of the media such as CNN or the New York Times are disrupted or completely inaccessible in the United States and in Europe, due to a large denial of service attack involving an intermediary company.

Several big-name Internet, including Twitter, Spotify and eBay were severely disrupted on Friday in the United States by a cyber attack directed against a provider of services. 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), as well as Reddit or Airbnb, was impossible on the american east coast.

The attack took the form of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Increasingly 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 (“botnets”). The target of the attack is the company Dyn, which is the bridge between the IP addresses and names of websites.

“This morning, the 21st of October, Dyn has been the victim of a huge DDoS attack on [its] infrastructure of Domain name system (DNS, domain name system, editor’s NOTE) on the east coast of the United States,” said Scott Hilton, executive vice president of the company. The problems of access, which seemed to be settled at the end of the afternoon, resumed in the early evening. Friday evening several of the sites were still disrupted, including for some users in Europe. The us authorities announced to investigate the origin of these attacks.

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, which has compromised the personal data of 500 million users. At the end of September, OVH has undergone one of the largest denial of service attacks ever suffered. It operated hundreds of thousands of connected cameras. 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.

Finally, cyber attacks are also on the us presidential campaign, with the publication by WikiLeaks of thousands of emails from the campaign manager of the candidate, democrat Hillary Clinton. “The Internet continues to be based on protocols and an infrastructure designed before cyber security was a problem,” noted Ben Johnson, an ex-hacker for the intelligence agency NSA, and co-founder of it security firm Carbon Black. “Denial of service” attacks, in particular, with the expansion of connected objects and unsecured, will continue to harass our organizations. Unfortunately, what we see is only the beginning in terms of botnets in large-scale and disproportionate harm,” he said.

(with AFP)