Apparent cyberattack downs some major websites
NEW YORK (FOX 5 NY) - Outages at a slew of websites may have been the job of cyberattackers.
According to TechCrunch.com, service on Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Soundify, Box, Boston Globe, New York Times, Github, Airbnb, Reddit, Freshbooks, Heroku and Vox Media properties was interrupted Friday.
An outage at Dyn, a major domain name server host, was the result of a distributed denial of service or DDoS attack, according to a post on Hacker News.
DNS hosts maintain a directory of domain names and translate them to Internet Protocol or IP addresses. Computers access websites based on IP addresses. A DDoS attack isn't a hack. The attack basically overwhelms the servers.
This attack mainly impacted the east coast of the United States.
The Dyn website reported service was restored but then later said it was experiencing more attacks.
"Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21st-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available."
Gizmodo reported the following sites were disrupted:
ActBlue
Basecamp
Big cartel
Box
Business Insider
CNN
Cleveland.com
Esty
Github
Grubhub
Guardian.co.uk
HBO Now
Iheart.com (iHeartRadio)
Imgur
Intercom
Intercom.com
Okta
PayPal
People.com
Playstation Network
Recode
Spotify
Squarespace Customer Sites
Starbucks rewards/gift cards
Storify.com
The Verge
Twillo
Urbandictionary.com (lol)
Weebly
Wired.com
Wix Customer Sites
Yammer
Yelp
Zendesk.com
Zoho CRM