Page 87 - Cyber Warnings

Even the experts

The past six months have seen a series of high-profile distributed denial of service attacks
dominate headlines, not only because of the size of the attacks and the extent of their damage
but because of the websites that have been targeted.

First up was Brian Krebs, a renowned internet security blogger who has made his career
breaking stories on data breaches, online fraud and hackings.

His website was among the first major victims of the massive Mirai botnet, powered by
hundreds of thousands of IoT devices.

In the face of what was then the biggest DDoS attack in history, weighing in at 600 Gbps, Krebs’
website went down for days, and his hosting company revoked their services as a result of the
attack.

Soon after the Krebs attack, the Mirai botnet struck again in a major way, taking down DNS
provider Dyn with a reported 1 Tbps attack.

As a result of this attack, internet giants Netflix, PayPal, Twitter and Spotify, among many
others, disappeared from the internet for hours despite presumably having top of the line
security measures implemented.
Another unlikely target buckled under a DDoS attack in February when Stack Overflow, the
internet’s biggest question and answer site for programmers and a favorite of tech experts the

87 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – May 2017 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide