A massive cyber attack created tumult last Friday, affecting majority of the East Coast's access to key sites such as Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, and Amazon.
Based on reports from USA Today, Dyn-a New Hampshire-based company, was victimized by an immense cyber hacking which started at 7:10 A.M.
Dyn supervises and controls internet traffic and a huge interruption to its services ceased users on the East Coast from logging in to Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit, even PayPal and other vital sites.
Fortunately, after more than 11 hours of service disruption, Dyn clarified at 6:17 P.M. on its website that the large-scale distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) had already been resolved and shortly, services had been restored.
Dyn's chief strategy officer Kyle York announced Friday, through a conference call with reporters, "It's a very smart attack. We start to mitigate, they react."
"It keeps on happening every time. We're learning though," York added.
However, despite all the efforts in identifying them, hackers are still unknown and on the loose. This poses a threat to various websites that can also be subject to DDoS.
On the brighter side, experts have already determined how the massive hacking became possible.
Netflix is an American entertainment conglomerate responsible for broadcasting "Stranger Things" and "Narcos". Spotify, on the other hand, is a Swedish company which provides licensed music, podcast, and video streaming services.
The online social networking site, Twitter, used globally especially by most celebrities like Ryan Reynolds and Chris Pratt, was also greatly affected.
Hackers took advantage of a botnet of internet-enabled devices. Experts assumed those hackers used publicly available source code and successfully clogged and interfered with traffic of world-renowned websites.
According to reports from The Christian Science Monitor, a malware program called Mirai was maximized by the hackers.
Certain news outlets like CNN and The New York Times were also inconvenienced as they are also Dyn's clients.
This notable cyber hacking caused numerous companies and organizations to re-assess their website protection to avoid the same lapse in the future.
Authorities are still in search for the hacker/s' information.
