October 22,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ , The NYT reported yesterday that major websites were inaccessible to people across many parts of the United States on Friday after a company that manages crucial parts of the internet’s infrastructure said it was under attack.
Waves of cyber attacks brought down many popular websites Friday, leaving millions of users without access and the Department of Homeland Security investigating the precise cause.
Users reported problems reaching several websites, including Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Reddit, Etsy, SoundCloud and The New York Times.This just a little over a month after the US Internet Giveaway to the U.N. and days after the Obama administration attempted to take Julian Assange founder of WikiLeaks off the internet.
This just a little over a month after the US Internet giveaway to the U.N. and days after the Obama administration attempted to take Julian Assange founder of WikiLeaks off the internet.
The attack, which is believed to be a coordinated effort, targeted a single Domain Name Server provider called Dyn. Dyn’s servers monitor and reroute internet traffic. The attack started just around 7am and is known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS. No information is obtained with DDoS attacks, they create major frustration. The DDoS attack affected Dyn’s infrastructure that supports internet connections, meaning the attack did not affect websites themselves. Instead, it blocked or slowed users from gaining access to sites.
According to the NYT , the attack appears to have relied on hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices like cameras, baby monitors and home routers that have been infected — without their owners’ knowledge — with software that allows hackers to command them to flood a target with overwhelming traffic.
WikiLeaks believes its supporters were responsible and it urged its supporters to ‘stop taking down the US internet’, saying ‘Mr Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing’.
It then tweeted: ‘The Obama administration should not have attempted to misuse its instruments of state to stop criticism of its ruling party candidate.’
The Ridgewood Blog remained largely unaffected which was a great relief to both the staff and our IT department . Giving past attempts to take down the site by some politicians , local and otherwise and foreign governments ,founder James Foytlin aka PJ blogger said ,”it’s nice to be left out of the fray” . Other staff members postulated that perhaps a more open posture to Wikileaks had left the (Ridgewood)blog unscathed.
