Credit : THOMAS SAMSON / AFP
TV5Monde had been the target of Wednesday 8 April, a cyber attack carried out by hackers claiming to be Daesh.
waking up Friday, October 21, several million Americans have the unpleasant surprise of being denied access to their favorite sites. Long hours, impossible indeed to connect to Twitter, Spotify, Amazon or eBay. But also to major media outlets, such as the New York Times, CNN, Boston Globe, Financial Times or even the famous daily English newspaper The Guardian. : a cyber attack massive conducted in several waves, which has severely disrupted the functioning of the internet across the Atlantic.
The fact that all these world famous sights are out of access, however, reveals that the tip of the iceberg. In fact, the pirates are made, in reality, the company Dyn, the awareness of the general public is much lower. The role of the firm is to redirect the flow from the internet to the hosts and translated in any way the names of sites into IP addresses. At 22h17, Dyn has stated that the incident was resolved.
The department of homeland security (DHS) and the FBI have announced in the wake of the opening of an investigation “on all the potential causes” of this gigantic piracy on a scale never before. The investigations which promise to be long-winded, as this attack was moving from the east coast to the west of the country seems to be sophisticated. “This is an attack on very elaborate. Each time that we neutralize, they adapt,” said Kyle Owen, an officer of Dyn, cited on the website specialized in Techcrunch.
Which is the origin of the attack ?
For the time being, the identity and origin of the authors remain unknown. But the scale of the hacking suspicious. “When I see such an attack, I tell myself that it is a State that is behind,” said Eric o’neill, in charge of strategy for the it security firm Carbon Black and ex-in charge of the fight against espionage in the FBI. The eyes inevitably turn to countries like Russia or China, who could have interest to destabilize the american giant, as the elections approach.
But other hypotheses are circulating. The Wikileaks website, which published thousands of emails from the campaign manager of the candidate democratic party presidential, Hillary Clinton, was believed to detect in this attack a mark of support for its founder, Julian Assange, a refugee 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.
How hackers have they done ?
The technique used Friday to immerse the web in america in the chaos is the so-called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This last is to render a server unavailable by overloading query. It is often conducted from a network of machines zombies – “botnets” – are themselves hacked and used without the knowledge of their owners. In this case, the hackers have hacked objects that are connected, such as smartphones, coffee machines, televisions, or lighting fixtures.
“These 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’ large-scale and disproportionate harm,” predicts Ben Johnson, ex-hacker for the us agency for intelligence NSA and co-founder of Carbon Black.
What can be the consequences ?
The company Dyn was prepared to this type of attack and was able to resolve the problem in relatively short period of time. But the consequences could be far more serious, in the sectors of finance, transportation or energy, much less prepared, according to Eric o’neill. Whatever the origin, the attack has brought to light the dangers posed by the growing use of connected objects, which can be used without the knowledge of their owners, to block access to a site. 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 cyberjihadistes with the help of 18,000 mobile devices.
The computer attacks and other acts of piracy are already resurgence in the United States and in other industrialized countries. Yahoo Mail has recently recognized that the data of 500 million users had been compromised two years ago. 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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