Web connected devices allowing hackers to break the internet
Megan Conley, Editor-in-Chief
Graphic courtesy of Megan Conley
On Friday, October 21, baby monitors across the nation prevented Americans along the east coast from checking their tweets and catching up on Stranger Things.
A cyberattack on an internet server company affected both users and websites alike, as the hackers used thousands of web-controlled devices to send an overwhelming amount of traffic to websites.
The outage affected several major websites, such as Netflix, Spotify, Twitter and The New York Times.
Technology officer at Intel Security Steve Grobman compared the hacking to traveling to a store without a GPS.
“It doesn’t matter that the store is fully open or operational if you have no idea how to get there,” said Grobman.
The attacked site, a domain name services company called Dyn, stated that the attacks came in three waves and the hackers changed their location so they could not be stopped.
Beginning at 7 a.m., the hackers accessed multiple devices connected to the internet, such as baby monitors, webcams and alarm systems. These devices were infected with a software that allowed them to be used to send information requests to the company.
With the overload of devices, the company’s servers could not keep up and access to websites from actual computers was prevented.
An internet performance monitoring firm, CloudHarmony, stated that the tracked disruption the morning of the 21st prevented one in two users from accessing the affected sites.
In an interview with the New York Times, Kyle York, the chief strategist of the Dyn corporation, stated that this was not the first time the attacks have occurred, nor will it be the last.
“The number and types of attacks, the duration of attacks and the complexity of these attacks are all on the rise,” said York.
These types of hacks are fairly common with single websites. Hackers send a flood of traffic to a website’s server and it crashes. However, the attack of something more complex, such as Dyn, hints at more sophisticated, and perhaps more dangerous, attacks in the future. Instead of one website crashing, multiple sites crash all at once.
But why would someone want to take down a server like this?
The group claiming responsibility for the attack, New World Hackers, states that the reasoning for the attack was simple: to expose security flaws.
Although law enforcement officials have not confirmed the attacks came from this group specifically, the group continues to speak out on the issue and its reasoning for disrupting internet traffic: better security.
“Secure your website and get better servers, otherwise be attacked again,” one member, who is known as “Ownz”, threatened on Twitter.
This incident only points at a deeper issue of the 21st century: the fragility of the internet.
With more and more devices being connected to the entity that connects the world, the lack of security across the world wide web is becoming more apparent.
These types of attacks not only leave users without services, but they are attacking the core and framework of the affected websites.
This could lead to further damage in the future and could even become threats to national security.
In response, many companies are moving their online framework to cloud storage, which should, according to York, prevent attacks like this from taking down the company, or similar networks, in the future.
