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October 21, 2016 10:00 pm

Amid Major Internet Outages, Affected Websites Have Lessons To Learn

Earlier today, Dyn, an internet infrastructure company, was hit by several DDoS attacks, which interestingly affected several popular websites including The New York Times, Reddit, Spotify, and Twitter that were directly or indirectly using Dyn's services. The attack is mostly visible across the US eastern seaboard with rest of the world noticing a few things broken here and there. Dyn says it's currently investigating a second round of DDoS attacks, though the severity of the outage is understandably less now. In the meantime, the Homeland Security said that it is aware of the attack and is investigating "all potential causes." Much of who is behind these attacks is unknown for now, and it is unlikely that we will know all the details until at least a few days. The attacks however have revealed how unprepared many websites are when their primary DNS provider goes down. ZDNet adds: The elephant in the room is that this probably shouldn't have happened. At very least there's a lot to learn already about the frailty of the internet DNS system, and the lack of failsafes and backups for websites and tech companies that rely on outsourced DNS service providers. "It's also a reminder of one risk of relying on multi-tenant service providers, be they DNS, or a variety of many other managed cloud service providers," said Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at Intel Security. Grobman warned that because this attack worked, it can be exploited again. "Given how much of our connected world must increasingly rely upon such cloud service providers, we should expect more such disruptions," he said. "We must place a premium of service providers that can present backup, failover, and enhance security capabilities allowing them to sustain and deflect such attacks." And that's key, because even though Dyn is under attack, it's the sites and services that rely on its infrastructure who should rethink their own "in case of emergency" failsafes. It may only be the east coast affected but lost traffic means lost revenue. Carl Levine, senior technical evangelist for NS1, another major managed DNS provider, said that the size and scale of recent attacks "has far exceeded what the industry thought was the upper end of the spectrum." "Large companies need to constantly upgrade their flood defenses. Some approaches that worked just a few years ago are now basically useless," said Kevin Curran, senior member with IEEE.We also recommend reading security reporter Brian Krebs's take on this.

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