Cybersecurity Breech Knocks Out East Coast Web Traffic

Monica Link October 21, 2016October 22, 2016 Cybersecurity

If you were trying to view your favorite websites Friday morning but the page didn’t load, don’t blame your internet service provider.

According to a report by Gizmodo and numerous media outlets, the outage was due to a Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS cyber attack at New Hampshire-based Dyn Inc., a major DNS provider that powers websites across the country.

Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit, PayPal and thousands of other sites were affected by the cyber attack. New York City Wired remained active during the East Coast cybersecurity breach.

Dyn released a statement addressing the attack that crippled web activity in New York City and along the East Coast.

“On Friday October 21, 2016 at approximately 11:10 UTC, Dyn came under attack by a large Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against our Managed DNS infrastructure in the US-East region. Customers affected may have seen regional resolution failures in US-East and intermittent spikes in latency globally. Dyn’s engineers were able to successfully mitigate the attack at approximately 13:20 UTC, and shortly after, the attack subsided.
At roughly 15:50 UTC a second DDoS attack began against the Managed DNS platform. This attack was distributed in a more global fashion. Affected customers may have seen intermittent resolution issues as well as increased global latency. At approximately 17:00 UTC, our engineers were again able to mitigate the attack and service was restored. ”

The company concluded its statement thanking the public and businesses for support.

“At Dyn, we take every incident seriously and work hard to ensure we deliver the service our customers have come to expect. We will continue to evaluate every situation with the goal of improving our systems and processes to deliver the utmost customer experience. Thank you for your continued support.”

Cybersecurity has become a major concern among businesses small and large as hackers get more savvy at breaking through security. According to research by Cybersecurity Ventures, Cybersecurity spending will exceed $1 trillion cumulatively over the next five-years, from 2017 to 2021.