Major Cyber Attack Disrupts Internet Service Across Europe And US

• Major Cyber Attack Disrupts Internet Service Across Europe And US
  by Sam Thielman in New York and Chris Johnston in London, 21 Oct 2016 
  Denial of service attack from unknown culprits on domain name system company Dyn caused access to be severely restricted for users on Friday.
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  US officials are investigating multiple attacks that caused widespread online disruption on both sides of the Atlantic on Friday. The Department of Homeland Security has begun an investigation into the DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, the Guardian confirmed.
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  The incident took offline some of the most popular sites on the web, including Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, CNN, PayPal, Pinterest and Fox News – as well as newspapers including the Guardian, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
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  The attacks seemed to have been focused on Dyn, one of the companies that run the internet’s domain name system (DNS).
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  Amazon’s web services division, the world’s biggest cloud computing company, also reported an outage that lasted several hours on Friday morning.
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  Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Dyn, said he was not sure if the outages at Dyn and Amazon were connected. “We provide service to Amazon, but theirs is a complex network so it is hard to be definitive about causality,” he said.
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  Amazon was not available for comment.
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  Dyn said it first became aware of the attack shortly after 7am ET on Friday. “We began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure,” the company said on its website.
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