Who Broke the Internets?

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) Broken Internet

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 Technology Officer, Chief Information Security Officer, BeyondTrust

With more than 20 years of IT industry experience, and author of Privileged Attack Vectors and Asset Attack Vectors, Mr. Haber joined BeyondTrust in 2012 as a part of the eEye Digital Security acquisition. He currently oversees the vision for BeyondTrust technology encompassing privileged access management, remote access, and vulnerability management solutions, and BeyondTrust’s own internal information security strategies. In 2004, Mr. Haber joined eEye as the Director of Security Engineering and was responsible for strategic business discussions and vulnerability management architectures in Fortune 500 clients. Prior to eEye, he was a Development Manager for Computer Associates, Inc. (CA), responsible for new product beta cycles and named customer accounts. Mr. Haber began his career as a Reliability and Maintainability Engineer for a government contractor building flight and training simulators. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Who Broke the Internets?

They Are All Pretty Much Down

You May Also Be Interested In:

The State of Identity: How Security Teams are Addressing Risk

Hacking Demos – Hacking the Human

Deconstructing Identity as a Cyberattack Vector

Privileged Access Management Solutions

Products

Resources

How to Secure Privileged Session Access to Cloud-based VMs

On the Blog

News

Who Broke the Internets?

They Are All Pretty Much Down

Stay Up To Date

You May Also Be Interested In:

The State of Identity: How Security Teams are Addressing Risk

Hacking Demos – Hacking the Human

Deconstructing Identity as a Cyberattack Vector