What We’re Following What Broke the Internet? Web users in much of the eastern U.S. this morning found their connections slowing to a crawl as a DDoS attack caused outages and other technical problems on more than a dozen major sites, including Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Netflix, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast, and The New York Times . A second attack followed later in the day and appeared to shut sites down in France, Japan, the U.K. A DDoS attack floods a website with junk traffic so it can’t process visits from ordinary people. This time, the attackers targeted a DNS (domain-name service) provider, a company that manages the infrastructure connecting websites’ addresses to their servers. That’s why so many different sites went down at once—in a successful large-scale attack unlike any other seen before . A Tangled Web: It’s not clear who was behind the attacks, whether it was individual hackers or even a foreign government. But whoever it was stands to do serious damage: Internet outages cost companies tens of thousands of dollars for every hour their sites are shut down. In a year that’s already seen apparent attempts to tamper with the U.S. presidential election through cyberattacks, voter registration and early voting could also be affected . Meanwhile, the new season of Netflix’s series Black Mirror provides an often-disturbing look at how technology permeates and shapes the human world . It’s food for thought for today—if you can
from Breaking News http://ift.tt/2eCkryQ
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