Technology

Massive cyberattack the result of malware-infected IoT devices

Widespread cyberattack takes down major sites worldwide

Many users around the world had trouble accessing popular services including Twitter, Paypal and Netflix during the attacks.

After websites like Amazon, Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Shopify and sites and services across the East Coast were shut down on Friday due to a sweeping outage of DNS provider Dyn, the services have been restored. The firm blames hacked connected devices were behind Friday's DDOS attack. They are still closely monitoring this undertaking and have been coordinating with law enforcement.

DDoS attacks have become more frequent and more powerful in recent years, but York called the cyberattacks that hit Dyn potentially "historic". IoT devices also have the disadvantage of not being able to run standard cyber security software.

"It showed people who doubted us what we were capable of doing, plus we got the chance to see our capability", said "Prophet".

"This attack on DYN so close to the election could be a way of making our country fell vulnerable in the days leading up to the election so that might be one of the purposes, it could be Russian Federation". When you type a URL, like bustle.com, into the address bar of your web browser you're computer needs that URL to be translated into an IP address before it can take you where you want to go.

Dyn said what it described as an "attack" was mainly affecting the East Coast and that its engineers were working on it. The company said that it started experiencing the attack at around 7 a. m.

The wave of several distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Dyn began at 1110 GMT on Friday (8pm AEDT on Thursday).

"Prophet" told the AP that his group actually had stopped its attacks by Friday afternoon, but that others, including members of the hacker collective known as Anonymous, had picked up where they left off. Dyn apparently acts as a phone directory for a large number of websites, and this attack was something like burning the phone directory as well as the phone company at the same time. Anonymous didn't respond to a request for comment via Twitter. A senior USA intelligence official told NBC News the current assessment is that this is a classic case of internet vandalism. He said he had no information about who may be behind the disruption.

Thus far, no-one has stepped forward to take responsibility for the attack, and Dyn has not mentioned receiving ransom demands or other communications from the attacker (s). Meanwhile, the Internet is no more under attack and is up and running.

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Massive cyberattack the result of malware-infected IoT devices