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On October 21, 2016, three consecutive distributed denial-of-service attacks were launched against the Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn. The attack caused major Internet platforms and services to be unavailable to large swathes of users in Europe and North America. The groups
Anonymous Anonymous may refer to: * Anonymity, the state of an individual's identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown ** Anonymous work, a work of art or literature that has an unnamed or unknown creator or author * Anonym ...
and New World Hackers claimed responsibility for the attack, but scant evidence was provided. As a DNS provider, Dyn provides to end-users the service of mapping an Internet domain name—when, for instance, entered into a web browser—to its corresponding IP address. The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was accomplished through numerous DNS lookup requests from tens of millions of IP addresses. The activities are believed to have been executed through a botnet consisting of many Internet-connected devices—such as printers, IP cameras, residential gateways and baby monitors—that had been infected with the Mirai malware.


Affected services

Services affected by the attack included: * Airbnb * Amazon.com *
Ancestry.com Ancestry.com LLC is an American genealogy company based in Lehi, Utah. The largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical, historical records, and related genetic genealogy websites. In November 2018, ...
* '' The A.V. Club'' * BBC * '' The Boston Globe'' *
Box A box (plural: boxes) is a container used for the storage or transportation of its contents. Most boxes have flat, parallel, rectangular sides. Boxes can be very small (like a matchbox) or very large (like a shipping box for furniture), and can ...
* '' Business Insider'' * CNN *
Comcast Comcast Corporation (formerly known as American Cable Systems and Comcast Holdings),Before the AT&T merger in 2001, the parent company was Comcast Holdings Corporation. Comcast Holdings Corporation now refers to a subsidiary of Comcast Corpora ...
* CrunchBase * DirecTV * '' The Elder Scrolls Online'' * Electronic Arts * Etsy * Evergreen ILS * FiveThirtyEight * Fox News * '' The Guardian'' * GitHub * Grubhub *
HBO Home Box Office (HBO) is an American premium television network, which is the flagship property of namesake parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is ba ...
* Heroku *
HostGator HostGator is a Houston-based provider of Shared web hosting service, shared, reseller, virtual private server, and Dedicated hosting service, dedicated web hosting with an additional presence in Austin, Texas. History HostGator was founded in Oc ...
*
iHeartRadio iHeartRadio (often shortened to just "iHeart") is an American freemium broadcast, podcast and radio streaming Computing platform, platform owned by iHeartMedia. It was founded in August 2008. , iHeartRadio was functioning as the national umbr ...
* Imgur * Indiegogo *
Mashable Mashable is a digital media platform, news website and entertainment company founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005. History Mashable was founded by Pete Cashmore while living in Aberdeen, Scotland, in July 2005. Early iterations of the site were a ...
* National Hockey League * Netflix * '' The New York Times'' *
Overstock.com Overstock.com, Inc. is an American internet retailer selling primarily furniture headquartered in Midvale, Utah, near Salt Lake City. Businessman Patrick M. Byrne founded Overstock.com in 1999. The company initially sold exclusively surplus and ...
* PayPal * Pinterest * Pixlr *
PlayStation Network PlayStation Network (PSN) is a digital media entertainment service provided by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Launched in November 2006, PSN was originally conceived for the PlayStation video game consoles, but soon extended to encompass smartp ...
* Qualtrics * Quora * Reddit * Roblox *
Ruby Lane Ruby Lane is considered one of the biggest vintage online retail stores. Business profile Ruby Lane sells antiques, vintage collectibles, vintage fashion, jewelry, dolls, and art for retail sale by independent member dealers. Ruby Lane shops se ...
* '' RuneScape'' *
SaneBox SaneBox is an email management software as a service that integrates with IMAP and Exchange Web Services (EWS) email accounts. Its primary function is to filter email messages that it deems unimportant into a folder for later processing. Histo ...
* Seamless * '' Second Life'' * Shopify *
Slack Slack may refer to: Places * Slack, West Yorkshire, a village in Calderdale, England * The Slack, a village in County Durham, England * Slack (river), a river in Pas-de-Calais department, France * Slacks Creek, Queensland, a suburb of Logan City, ...
* SoundCloud * Squarespace * Spotify *
Starbucks Starbucks Corporation is an American multinational chain of coffeehouses and roastery reserves headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It is the world's largest coffeehouse chain. As of November 2021, the company had 33,833 stores in 80 c ...
*
Storify Storify was a social network service that let the user create stories or timelines using social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Storify was launched in September 2010, and had been open to the public since April 2011. Storify was ...
* Swedish Civil Contingencies AgencyJoel Westerholm.
Så sänktes Twitter och Regeringen.se i attacken
,
Sveriges Radio Sveriges Radio AB (, "Sweden's Radio") is Sweden's national publicly funded radio broadcaster. Sveriges Radio is a public limited company, owned by an independent foundation, previously funded through a licensing fee, the level of which is d ...
, 24 October 2016. Retrieved 30 October 2016.
*
Swedish Government The Government of the Kingdom of Sweden ( sv, Konungariket Sveriges regering) is the national cabinet of Sweden, and the country's executive authority. The Government consists of the Prime Ministerappointed and dismissed by the Speaker of the R ...
* Tumblr * Twilio * Twitter * Verizon Communications * Visa * Vox Media * Walgreens * '' The Wall Street Journal'' * Wikia * '' Wired'' *
Wix.com Wix.com Ltd. ( he, וויקס.קום) is an Israeli software company, publicly listed in the US, that provides cloud-based web development services. It allows users to create HTML5 websites and mobile sites through the use of online drag and dr ...
* WWE Network *
Xbox Live The Xbox network, formerly and still sometimes branded as Xbox Live, is an Internet, online multiplayer video game, multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service created and operated by Microsoft. It was first made available to the Xbox ...
*
Yammer Yammer () is an enterprise social networking service that is part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. It is used mainly for private communication within organizations but is also used for networks spanning various organizations. Access to a ...
* Yelp * Zillow


Investigation

The US Department of Homeland Security started an investigation into the attacks, according to a White House source. No group of hackers claimed responsibility during or in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Dyn's chief strategist said in an interview that the assaults on the company's servers were very complex and unlike everyday DDoS attacks.
Barbara Simons Barbara Bluestein Simons (born January 26, 1941) is an American computer scientist and the former president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is a Ph.D. graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and spent her early ca ...
, a member of the advisory board of the United States
Election Assistance Commission The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is an independent agency of the United States government created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). The Commission serves as a national clearinghouse and resource of information regarding electi ...
, said such attacks could affect electronic voting for overseas military or civilians. Dyn disclosed that, according to business risk intelligence firm FlashPoint and Akamai Technologies, the attack was a botnet coordinated through numerous
Internet of Things The Internet of things (IoT) describes physical objects (or groups of such objects) with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other comm ...
-enabled (IoT) devices, including cameras, residential gateways, and baby monitors, that had been infected with Mirai malware. The attribution of the attack to the Mirai botnet had been previously reported by BackConnect Inc., another security firm. Dyn stated that they were receiving malicious requests from tens of millions of IP addresses. Mirai is designed to brute-force the security on an IoT device, allowing it to be controlled remotely. Cybersecurity investigator Brian Krebs noted that the source code for Mirai had been released onto the Internet in an
open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
manner some weeks prior, which made the investigation of the perpetrator more difficult. On 25 October 2016, US President Obama stated that the investigators still had no idea who carried out the cyberattack. On 13 December 2017, the Justice Department announced that three men (Paras Jha, 21, Josiah White, 20, and Dalton Norman, 21) had entered guilty pleas in cybercrime cases relating to the Mirai and clickfraud botnets.


Perpetrators

In correspondence with the website '' Politico'', hacktivist groups SpainSquad,
Anonymous Anonymous may refer to: * Anonymity, the state of an individual's identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown ** Anonymous work, a work of art or literature that has an unnamed or unknown creator or author * Anonym ...
, and New World Hackers claimed responsibility for the attack in retaliation against Ecuador's rescinding Internet access to WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange Julian Paul Assange ( ; Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army inte ...
, at their embassy in London, where he had been granted asylum. This claim has yet to be confirmed. WikiLeaks alluded to the attack on Twitter, tweeting "Mr. Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing. We ask supporters to stop taking down the US internet. You proved your point." New World Hackers has claimed responsibility in the past for similar attacks targeting sites like BBC and ESPN.com. On October 26, FlashPoint stated that the attack was most likely done by script kiddies. A November 17, 2016, a ''Forbes'' article reported that the attack was likely carried out by "an angry gamer". A September 20, 2018, a WeLiveSecurity article stated that its three creators meant it as a way of gaining an advantage in fierce competition surrounding the computer game Minecraft – by preventing players from using competitors’ servers and driving them to their own servers in order to ultimately make money off them. On December 9, 2020, one of the perpetrators pleaded guilty to taking part in the attack. The perpetrator's name was withheld due to his or her age.


See also

* WannaCry ransomware attack * Mirai (malware) * Vulnerability (computing)


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dyn cyberattack, October 2016 2016 in computing Denial-of-service attacks October 2016 crimes in Europe October 2016 crimes in the United States Internet of things WikiLeaks Botnets Malware Domain Name System Hacking in the 2010s Cloud infrastructure attacks and failures 2010s internet outages