DDoS attacks on Dyn

DDoS attacks on Dyn
Map of the areas most affected by the attacks,
16:45 UTC, 21 October 2016.[1]
DateOctober 21, 2016 (2016-10-21)
Time11:10 – 13:20 UTC
15:50 – 17:00 UTC
20:00 – 22:10 UTC[2]
LocationEurope and North America, especially the Eastern United States
TypeDistributed denial-of-service
ParticipantsUnknown
SuspectsNew World Hackers, Anonymous
(self-claimed)

On October 21, 2016, three consecutive distributed denial-of-service attacks were launched against the Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn. The attack caused major Internet platforms and services to be unavailable to large swathes of users in Europe and North America.[3][4] The groups Anonymous and New World Hackers claimed responsibility for the attack, but scant evidence was provided.[5]

As a DNS provider, Dyn provides to end-users the service of mapping an Internet domain name—when, for instance, entered into a web browser—to its corresponding IP address. The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was accomplished through numerous DNS lookup requests from tens of millions of IP addresses.[6] The activities are believed to have been executed through a botnet consisting of many Internet-connected devices—such as printers, IP cameras, residential gateways and baby monitors—that had been infected with the Mirai malware.

  1. ^ "Level3 outage? Current problems and outages". downdetector.com. Retrieved 23 October 2016.
  2. ^ Dyn (26 October 2016). "Official Dyn Analysis Summary". dyn.com. Retrieved 5 February 2019.
  3. ^ Etherington, Darrell; Conger, Kate (21 October 2016). "Many sites including Twitter, Shopify and Spotify suffering outage". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  4. ^ "The Possible Vendetta Behind the East Coast Web Slowdown". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference politico1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference wired was invoked but never defined (see the help page).