Cyberattacks pounded the underpinnings of the Internet Friday, crippling Twitter, Netflix and other major websites with the help of once-dumb devices made smart with online connections.
Waves of attacks incapacitated a crucial piece of Internet infrastructure, hampering or outright blocking access to popular online venues.
“When I see something like this, I have to think state actor,” said Carbon Black national security strategist Eric O’Neill, a former “spy hunter” on the FBI counter-intelligence force.
“This is not some hacker sitting in his basement typing away on a keyboard.”
The attack was said to put a troubling new spin on an old hacker attack known as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), where millions of devices in the fast-growing Internet of things took part in the cyber onslaught. Armies of computers infected with malicious code are typically used in DDoS attacks intended to overwhelm targets with simultaneous online requests.
Hacker software referred to as Mirai that takes control of IoT devices was evidently linked to the attack, with the broad range of devices making requests helping get past Dyn defenses.
“We are seeing attacks coming from a number of different locations,” Level 3 Communications Internet services company chief security officer Dale Drew said in a video posted online.
“We are seeing attacks coming from an Internet-of-things botnet that we identified called Mirai also involved in this attack.”
Heavyweight cyberattacks that seem to yield trouble but no apparent payoff could be probing defenses to refine tactics for use on high value targets such as utilities or transportation systems, according to O’Neill and other computer defense specialists.
The attack could also have been meant as a message from a foreign power, cyber security analysts told AFP.
The onslaught commanded the attention of top US security agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.
“DHS and the FBI are aware and are investigating all potential causes” of the outages, a spokeswoman said.
The outages left Internet users unable to post messages, shop, watch videos and play games online for parts of the day. Dynamic Network Services Inc, which manages Internet traffic, said around 1100 GMT that its infrastructure had been hit by a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack in the eastern part of the US.

Source: Arab News