What do Twitter, Spotify, SaneBox, Reddit, Box, Github, Zoho CRM, PayPal, Airbnb, Freshbooks, Wired.com, Pinterest, Heroku and Vox Media properties have in common on the morning of October 21, 2016?
They Are All Pretty Much Down
Check out this graphic from downdetector.com to see just how many sites have been impacted. (click to enlarge)
One of the largest risks to the Internet is if critical services are attacked or compromised. As a result, vast numbers of companies, services, transactions, and operations can go completely dark. Today, a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack is affecting much of the east coast of the United States and crippling these websites, their commerce, and making them nearly unavailable according to The Hacker News. This story is now becoming the hot news across CNN and the Wall Street Journal, with journalists scrambling for details on the attack and the outage.
While the true source of the attack is still unknown, theories about the technology currently being used in the DDoS range from DVR IoT devices (used in a similar attack a few weeks ago in France) to a sponsored nation state. There are indications that a sophisticated variant of the Mirai DDOS malware named Hajime has started to propagate, and may have been a cause of these latest outages. Hajime is a self-propagating IoT worm that uses brute-force attacks to infect systems, relying on hardcoded or default credentials in IoT source code.
The US Department of Homeland Security warned on October 14, 2016 that hackers where infecting internet connected routers, printers, and smart TV’s to build armies of bots for potentially such a purpose. The financial impact is something everyone should take notice of. When more details emerge about the who, what, when, and where we will certainly keep you up to date. For now, everyone wants their services restored and a deep comprehensive report on how this happened, what devices did they use, and who was behind it. Then, and only then, can we figure out how we can stop it from happening again. Stay tuned for more…
Morey J. Haber, Chief Security Officer, BeyondTrust
Morey J. Haber is the Chief Security Officer at BeyondTrust. He has more than 25 years of IT industry experience and has authored three books: Privileged Attack Vectors, Asset Attack Vectors, and Identity Attack Vectors. He is a founding member of the industry group Transparency in Cyber, and in 2020 was elected to the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA) Executive Advisory Board. Morey currently oversees BeyondTrust security and governance for corporate and cloud based solutions and regularly consults for global periodicals and media. He originally joined BeyondTrust in 2012 as a part of the eEye Digital Security acquisition where he served as a Product Owner and Solutions Engineer since 2004. Prior to eEye, he was Beta Development Manager for Computer Associates, Inc. He began his career as Reliability and Maintainability Engineer for a government contractor building flight and training simulators. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.