Dyn, which manages website domains and routes internet traffic, experienced two distributed denial of service attacks on its DNS servers. A DDoS attack is an attempt to flood a website with so much traffic that it impairs normal service.
"If you take out one of these DNS service providers, you can disrupt a large number of popular online services, which is exactly what we're seeing today," said Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security strategy at cybersecurity startup SentinelOne. The massive outage drew the attention of the FBI which said Friday that it was "investigating all potential causes" of the attack.
Initially, outages were primarily impacting those on the East Coast, but by midday Friday, people in Europe were reporting outages as well.
"We've never really seen anything this targeted [that] impacts so many sites," said David Jones, director of sales engineering at software IT company Dynatrace. "Typically DDoS attacks are targeted at individual sites. DNS is like a phone book: this is like someone is attacking the phone company and burning all the phone books at the same time."
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack yet. A government official said the U.S. is "looking at all possible scenarios including possible cyber activity." CNN
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