Cyber Attack Hits Internet; Down Sizes Al.com

By Czarina Ara Lasco

Oct 24, 2016 06:00 AM EDT

On Friday morning and in the afternoon, websites such as Al.com, Twitter, Etsy, Github, Vox, Spotify, Airbnb, Netflix and Reddit was unavailable for users due to a massive cyber-attack. The White House has defined the huge internet interference as malicious.

The Department of Homeland Security is currently investigating the said cyber-attack which affected millions of daily internet users.

It is not known who is to blame for the cyber attack but the Department of Homeland Security - which is currently observing National Cyber Security Awareness Month - is investigating the breach.

"The Department is investigating all potential causes," Gillian Christensen, a spokesperson for the United States' Department of Homeland Security said in an interview with Time.

On the other hand, Josh Earnest, White House spokesperson, held that the President Barack Obama and his administration are fully aware with the massive cyber attack. Federal agencies, according to Earnest, also monitor the situation.

"At this point I do not have any information to share on who might be responsible for the malicious activity," Earnest said in an interview on Friday.

Said website disruptions were attributed to the so-called denial of service - or DDoS - attack on DynDNS.com, an Internet performance management company, offering products to monitor, control, and optimize online infrastructure, and also domain registration services and email products, which also converts domain names of websites into IP addresses which allows people to access their most visited websites.

On Friday morning, Dyn confirmed  that it was the target of a DDoS attack which is an internet version of spam mail that has the ability to bring down online services through overwhelming them with traffic from several sources.

Dyn defined the attacks to CNBC as "well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions of IP addresses at the same time." The management, in its official statement, also furthered that the attack was from what was known as the "Internet of Things" which includes some online DVRs, printers and appliances. Dyn said that those items seem to be infected with malware.

"Our engineers continue to investigate and mitigate several attacks aimed against the Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure," Dyn added.

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