It’s got nothing to do with us in India, but the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in the United States on Friday is bigger than what anyone would have imagined.
This attack crippled social networking sites like Twitter, GitHub, Reddit and Paypal to name a few, for a good part of the day, to the grief of millions of users in the region.
But what really stands out from all of this, is the apparent threat to internet and the vulnerability of the digital space that we can’t live without.
Here’s a closer look at how things unfolded on Friday, that pretty much disrupted life in particular parts of the United States.
What is a DDoS attack?
This form of attack involves the hackers flooding the targeted site with incessant internet traffic that creates a bottleneck at their server’s end. Thereby forcing them to shutdown their services for a brief period, in order to regain control of the servers.
This isn’t the first time when such attacks have been reported, and definitely not the last one.
But cyber experts are clearly worried for the evolving sophistication of the attacks over the years, and that’s not a good sign, especially when the internet is the backbone of the global economy with its connect.
Who was the target here?
The DDoS attacks majorly affected servers of a company called Dyn. This company’s servers are said to be responsible for monitoring, as well as rerouting, the internet traffic of major platforms such as Netflix, Twitter, Soundcloud and Paypal, among others.
Attacks on domain name system (DNS) providers like Dyn has the potential to affect multiple sites.
Experts suggest that the impact of such attacks on DNS like Dyn could end up bringing the internet to a standstill, which for most of us would be a nightmare. Most tech experts were willing to hold China and Russia accountable for these attacks, but...
Who's done this attack?
While the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security were looking into the incident, turns out, a hacking group supposedly claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks via Twitter.
This group called New World Hackers shared this information via an interview which was published by anonintelgroup late Friday evening.
This group is also credited with attacking BBC last year. However, it’s intriguing to observe that the group claims the attack in the United States is actually against the Russians.
We have an annual power test each year and this is actually against Russia. Testing power is the key. Like that we see how much bandwidth each attack outputs… It’s for the good. Russia is pretty much saying they are better than the US by hacking into everything attempting to start a war. We will show them a war.New Hackers Group to Anonintelgroup
Clearly, the hacker group has proven its point.
How did the Group manage to hit the servers?
That’s got to be the focal point behind understanding the root cause of the cyber attacks on Dyn. New Hackers Group has openly confirmed its brute force attack, and highlighted its strength and capability to make a huge dent in the web-o-sphere.
Our botnet is a supercomputer botnet consisting of over 100,000 IoT devices.New Hackers Group to Anonintelgroup
Internet of Things (IoT), as they call it, is clearly the channel via which the group managed to connect with the servers. These devices can be anything from a smart clock in your living room to a digital camera that comes with built-in WiFi connectivity support.
The threat to cyber security streams directly from our households. Devices like cameras, smartwatches, or anything that’s directly communicating with internet has the potential to be the point of such attacks.
IoT as a space is growing year-on-year with companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft at the forefront. But with internet almost reaching a state of infinity, it’s hard to guard something as big as the whole universe.
What's Next?
These attacks are only getting more effective and powerful as time goes on. We’re heading into a future in which privacy is no one’s birth right. We’re risking everything in our lives for the sake of heading into a future that, at some stage, is bound to be controlled by machines.
In our rush to push the frontiers of technology, where IoT stands to become the fulcrum of humanity’s evolution, we must first make sure we foolproof our existing digital ecosystem.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)