Cyber attacks temporarily shut down Twitter, other U.S. sites

Botnets created from the Mirai malware were at least partly responsible for Friday’s massive internet disruption, according to Dyn, the DNS service provider targeted in the assault.

In layman’s terms, it went something like this.

Dyn is part of the backbone of the internet. The widespread attack is challenging because it is hard to distinguish between botnet and legitimate traffic.

Users were unable to change the default password on their devices, which allowed hackers to install malware and commandeer them for the DDoS attack. This strategy may work as a effect of users’ negligence towards password security of stationary devices, which the users do not directly interact with in their everyday life while leaving them exposed to the Internet. Many of those devices feature little in the way of security, making them easy targets for hackers. This sort of behaviour is reminiscent of Mirai, which sniffs out devices on the internet of things and then performs a dictionary attack to gain access.

21, hackers used millions of everyday internet-connected devices such as printers, refrigerators, cameras and so on to launch an unprecedented attack on a critical part of the Internet. But the company has not confirmed the cyber attack.

According to internet security experts, much of the blame for Friday’s internet outage falls on the companies whose inadequate security standards made the attack possible.

Currently, it’s unknown who was behind the attacks.

External peripherals were used as weapons in hacking by the cyber attackers. A DDos attack is executed by generating a huge traffic to a website or service eventually resulting in shutting down of the service. It’s unclear which, if any, major sites have been affected by the follow-on attacks. The FBI and US Department of Homeland Security are reportedly investigating these attacks.

The outage, which mainly affected the East Coast of the US, struck on Friday morning but was felt into the weekend.

Security firm Flashpoint has been working with Dyn – the company providing core internet services to the websites affected – to investigate the attacks. An attack on the website of cybersecurity Brian Krebs last month managed to deliver 665Gbps of traffic to Kreb’s site, making it one of the largest DDOS attacks ever recorded.

The initial attack was resolved within about two hours, but the company was hit with a second.