Recent DDoS Attack Was Largest EverAdded: Saturday, October 29th, 2016Category: Recent Headlines Involving File Sharing > Current Events Tags:ISP, Download, BitTorrent, MPAA, RIAA, copyright-infringement, file-sharing, Torrenting |
The
cybersecurity experts said that the recent cyberattack responsible for
taking down much of the US Internet was caused by Mirai botnet and was
estimated as the largest of its kind in history. The botnet targeted the
servers of Dyn, a company controlling much of the DNS infrastructure,
which consequently affected largest websites including Twitter, Netflix,
Reddit, the Guardian, CNN and others in Europe and the United States.
The outage was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, performed by a network of computers infected with malware, which coordinated into bombarding a server with traffic until it is overwhelmed. The Mirai botnet was detected as the “primary source of malicious attack traffic” and differs from other botnets by its structure: instead of being made up of computers, it consists of the so-called “Internet of Things” (web cameras, printers and other web-connected devices).
Due to a huge number of Internet-connected devices, Mirai attacks were much larger than ordinary DDoS attacks. Its extent was estimated as involving 100,000 malicious endpoints, and the attack strength reached 1.2Tbps. The industry experts estimate the attack roughly twice as powerful as any similar attack on record.
The same botnet was used in the attack against the information security blog Krebs, which topped out at 665 Gbps. Security specialists say there is no real strategy to combat cyber insecurity of Internet-connected devices. Apparently, a non-state group exploited the problem on such a significant scale, and a well-resourced state actor could do much more with the botnet, and the consequences are hard to predict.
Posted by: QR
The outage was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, performed by a network of computers infected with malware, which coordinated into bombarding a server with traffic until it is overwhelmed. The Mirai botnet was detected as the “primary source of malicious attack traffic” and differs from other botnets by its structure: instead of being made up of computers, it consists of the so-called “Internet of Things” (web cameras, printers and other web-connected devices).
Due to a huge number of Internet-connected devices, Mirai attacks were much larger than ordinary DDoS attacks. Its extent was estimated as involving 100,000 malicious endpoints, and the attack strength reached 1.2Tbps. The industry experts estimate the attack roughly twice as powerful as any similar attack on record.
The same botnet was used in the attack against the information security blog Krebs, which topped out at 665 Gbps. Security specialists say there is no real strategy to combat cyber insecurity of Internet-connected devices. Apparently, a non-state group exploited the problem on such a significant scale, and a well-resourced state actor could do much more with the botnet, and the consequences are hard to predict.
Posted by: QR