Joey DeVilla provides a convenient layman’s terms description of last Friday’s denial of service attacks on Dyn:
A map of the parts of the internet affected by Friday’s attack. The redder an area is, the more heavily it was affected.
If you’ve been reading about the cyberattack that took place last Friday and are confused by the jargon and technobabble, this primer was written for you! By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of what happened, what caused it, and what can be done to prevent similar problems in the future.
[…]
Hackread’s animation of what happened last Friday. Click the image to see the source.
On Friday, October 21, 2016 at around 6:00 a.m. EDT, a botnet made up of what could be up to tens of millions of machines — a large number of which were IoT devices — mounted a denial-of-service attack on Dyn, disrupting DNS over a large part of the internet in the U.S.. This in turn led to a large internet outage on the U.S. east coast, slowing down the internet for many users and rendered a number of big sites inaccessible, including Amazon, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, Tumblr, and Twitter.
Flashpoint, a firm that detects and mitigates online threats, was the first to announce that the attack was carried out by a botnet of compromised IoT devices controlled by Mirai malware. Dyn later corroborated Flashpoint’s claim, stating that their servers were under attack from devices located at millions of IP addresses.
The animation above is a visualization of the attack based on the devices’ IP addresses and IP geolocation (a means of approximating the geographic location of an IP address; for more, see this explanation on Stack Overflow). Note that the majority of the devices were at IP addresses (and therefore, geographic locations) outside the United States.
