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Major Players Fall Victim to DDoS Attacks
DYN and KrebsOnSecurity Suffer DDoS Attacks
By Yevgeniya Davydov, Owner, ReliableSite.net
DDoS attacks have become increasingly common in recent years; in fact, the year 2014 alone
saw a 29% increase in DDoS attack frequency. Specifically, DDoS attacks work by flooding a
website with traffic, which can ultimately cause the site to become inaccessible to legitimate
users.
As a result, more and more website owners and administrators have begun opting for DDoS
protection as part of their hosting packages.
A DDoS attack can happen to any website at any time. And unfortunately, it's become common
lately for even some of the web's major players to fall victim to these attacks.
DYN DDoS Attacks
DYN is just one of many larger corporations that has recently been affected by a large DDoS
attack. For those unfamiliar with DYN, they are the company that provides services for a
number of major players, including:
• Spotify
• SoundCloud
Back in late October of this year, a large DDoS attack resulted in a denial of service on DYN's
east coast infrastructure, which directly affected these major sites. Many users were unable to
access these sites for a significant period of time.
Despite the DDoS protection already in place, the sheer size of this attack simply could not be
stopped in time, and these sites (and their users) suffered majorly as a result.
KrebsOnSecurity DDoS Attack
A little earlier in the year (in September), a major attack on Brian Krebs' website
KrebsOnSecurity resulted in a huge monetary loss for cloud-hosting company Akamai
Technologies. As a result, the hosting company ended up dumping Krebs as a user due to the
high costs associated with having to fend off the attack for the service. It is worth noting that
16 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine January 2017 Edition
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