Elliott Out Here Trying To Hack The Internets

[MIKE SPLEAN]

http://gizmodo.com/this-is-probably-why-half-the-internet-shut-down-today-1788062835

Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, and a huge swath of other websites were down or screwed up this morning. This was happening as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. It’s probably safe to assume that the two situations are related.


Update 12:28 PM EST: Dyn says it is investigating yet another attack, causing the same massive outages experienced this morning. Based on emails from Gizmodo readers, this new wave of attacks seems to be affecting the West Coast of the United States and Europe. It’s so far unclear how the two attacks are related, but the outages are very similar.

In order to understand how one DDoS attack could take out so many websites, you have to understand how Domain Name Servers (DNS) work. Basically, they act as the Internet’s phone book and facilitate your request to go to a certain webpage and make sure you are taken to the right place. If the DNS provider that handles requests for Twitter is down, well, good luck getting to Twitter. Some websites are coming back for some users, but it doesn’t look like the problem is fully resolved.

Today's Brutal DDoS Attack Is the Beginning of a Bleak Future
This morning a ton of websites and services, including Spotify and Twitter, were unreachable…Read more

Dyn posted this update on its website: “Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.”

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Here’s a list of websites that readers have told us they are having trouble accessing:

• ActBlue
  
• Basecamp
  
• Big cartel
  
• Box
  
• Business Insider
  
• CNN
  
• Cleveland.com
  
• Etsy
  
• Github
  
• Grubhub
  
• Guardian.co.uk
  
• HBO Now
  
• Iheart.com (iHeartRadio)
  
• Imgur
  
• Intercom
  
• Intercom.com
  
• Okta
  
• PayPal
  
• People.com
  
• Pinterest
  
• Playstation Network
  
• Recode
  
• Reddit
  
• Spotify
  
• Squarespace Customer Sites
  
• Starbucks rewards/gift cards
  
• Storify.com
  
• The Verge
  
• Twillo
  
• Twitter
  
• Urbandictionary.com (lol)
  
• Weebly
  
• Wired.com
  
• Wix Customer Sites
  
• Yammer
  
• Yelp
  
• Zendesk.com
  
• Zoho CRM
  
• Credit Karma
  
• Eventbrite
  
• Netflix
  
• NHL.com
  
• Fox News
  
• Disqus
  
• Shopify
  
• Soundcloud
  
• Atom.io
  
• Ancersty.com
  
• ConstantContact
  
• Indeed.com
  
• New York Times
  
• Weather.com
  
• Mashable
• WSJ.com
• time.com
• xbox.com
• dailynews.com
• Wikia
• donorschoose.org
• Wufoo.com
• Genonebiology.com
• BBC
• Elder Scrolls Online
• Eve Online
• PagerDuty
• Kayak
• youneedabudget.com
• Speed Test
• Freshbooks
• Braintree
• Blue Host
• Qualtrics
• SBNation
• Salsify.com
• Zillow.com
• nimbleschedule.com

Here’s an internet outage map from DownDetectoras of 12:46 PM EST:

Here’s a gif that shows the internet outage at 9:00 AM EST versus 12:30 PM EST:

At the time of publication Dyn said that it was still dealing with the problem.

 

[MIKE SPLEAN]

Probably Russia

 

[Reflected]

Yeah, rip github. Paypal is finally up though.

edit: Funny how things don't get hit until I need access to it. lol

 

[Tug life]

Anybody that knows anything about hacking would know a DDoS attack isn't hacking and is a low level skill. All you are doing is sending fake traffic to a site and overloading it. When you have a good amount of people you can shut any website down. But this is a serious crime and you can do years in jail for that

 

[Cartier Murphy]

 

[Tenchi Ryu]

I knew something was up, having some issues with some images loading.

Do the lords work and hack Realitykings

 

[el_oh_el]

Anybody that knows anything about hacking would know a DDoS attack isn't hacking and is a low level skill. All you are doing is sending fake traffic to a site and overloading it. When you have a good amount of people you can shut any website down. But this is a serious crime and you can do years in jail for that

Yep. As insecure as stuff on the internet can be these days all you need is the time and knowhow to create a small botnet..point the net to an IP or IP range..voila DDDOSed

 

[jdubnyce]

Probably Russia

thecoli.com better not make it to the list Elliot

 

[Rozay Oro]

Anybody that knows anything about hacking would know a DDoS attack isn't hacking and is a low level skill. All you are doing is sending fake traffic to a site and overloading it. When you have a good amount of people you can shut any website down. But this is a serious crime and you can do years in jail for that

oh ok. How were people getting credit card info during the ddos attacks of psn and xbox last Christmas? Is a ddos attack like a diversion for the real hacking?

 

[Adidacs]

Anybody that knows anything about hacking would know a DDoS attack isn't hacking and is a low level skill. All you are doing is sending fake traffic to a site and overloading it. When you have a good amount of people you can shut any website down. But this is a serious crime and you can do years in jail for that

lol good amount of people

tf are you talking about

 

[MIKE SPLEAN]

thecoli.com better not make it to the list Elliot

Still the funniest episode.

 

[MIKE SPLEAN]

oh ok. How were people getting credit card info during the ddos attacks of psn and xbox last Christmas? Is a ddos attack like a diversion for the real hacking?

 

[Field Marshall Bradley]

Anybody that knows anything about hacking would know a DDoS attack isn't hacking and is a low level skill. All you are doing is sending fake traffic to a site and overloading it. When you have a good amount of people you can shut any website down. But this is a serious crime and you can do years in jail for that

Low Level skill may not be the best way to describe it,,, but in the grand scheme of hacking, its no at the rudimentary level

 

[TL15]

Is Pornhub ok?

 

[Rozay Oro]

By people I meant the hackers btw