Massive web attack briefly knocks out top sites

 

Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, Soundcloud and several other sites have been affected by a web attack.

All the firms are customers of a company called Dyn which they use to help users find their sites online.
DynDNS has been swamped with data in what is known as a distributed denial of service (DDos) attack that has made the sites of its customers hard to reach.
It is not clear who is behind the data deluge or why Dyn has been hit.

Lost directory

In a statement on its website Dyn said the DDoS attack started early on Friday morning in the US and affected firms more in the east of the country. The initial impact of the attack made some sites harder to reach as queries sent to locate them took longer to process.
Reddit, Twitter, Etsy, Github, Soundcloud, Spotify and
many others were all reported as being hard to reach by users via social media. Access to sites such as Paypal, Pinterest and Tumblr as well as some cable firms were also reported as being intermittent.
In a message posted to Twitter, and widely shared, Github said a "global event" was affecting Dyn and made its site hard to find.
The effects of the attack were felt for a couple of hours and by late morning, Dyn said its services had been restored to normal.
The incident marks a change in tactics as DDoS attacks are more typically aimed at a single site. Dyn acts as a directory service for huge numbers of firms that helps their customers keep global address books up to date with the location of their domains.
Richard Meeus, from security company NSFocus, said the attack showed how critical domain directory services were to the running of the net and how that they had often been "neglected" security-wise.

 

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