Friday morning, October 21, saw a drop in social traffic as a server host, Dyn, got DDoSed. DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service, which effectively denies access to the server. This attack denied access to many sites that used this server host such as Spotify and Paypal.

Dale Drew, the chief security officer for Level 3, an internet backbone provider, released a video on Periscope, a mobile live streaming service, explaining the situation. Drew explains this specific attack by first explaining what DDoS is.

DDoS means to overflood a service provider so much so that it can not handle the workload, effectively blocking any and all users from that site or server. What is happening in this instance is that each of these sites are being overflooded all at once, overloading the site and the server simultaneously.

These attacks seemed to be centralized on the east coast of the United States where a lot of servers reside.

Dyn had seen three attacks come to their servers as they went down as soon as they came back up.

Many major websites that have been affected include Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, Paypal, Etsy, HBO Now, Imgur, New York Times, People, Reddit, Playstation Network, Soundcloud, SpeedTest, Whatsapp, and many more.

Due of the nature of a DDoS attack, it is difficult to locate the source and the culprit will unlikely be caught.

The company has stated that the attacks are “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions of IP addresses at the same time.”

Dyn has now stabilized their servers and are running smoothly. Attacks of this scale are quite rare as they seem to occur every 2-3 years in nature. As we see an increase in cyber-security, attacks like these will surely dwindle.