December 17, 2015
By Anthony Cuthertson
A smartphone app (click here) used by Islamic State (Isis) to spread news and propaganda could be behind the massive attack on the internet's core infrastructure that took place earlier this month, according to several cybersecurity experts.
Analysis of the IS Amaq Agency app has revealed that it was potentially the source of a botnet created to perform a massive DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on root name servers. A more powerful attack in the future could cause significant disruption to internet services and could even temporarily take down the internet.
The cyberattack, which took place between 30 November and 1 December, targeted the 13 internet root name servers that are responsible for supporting almost the entire internet. Cybersecurity experts, high-profile hackers and members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous now claim that a smartphone app was the most likely culprit for the botnet attack, which flooded the servers with five million queries per second at the peak of the attack. It is estimated that as few as 18,000 devices running the app through Wi-Fi networks would have been capable of creating such traffic....
