There needs to be better security for the USA internet users. There really is no time to 'figure it out.' The next attack could come as soon as the next minute or hour.
October 21, 2016
Robinson Meyer and Adrienne LaFrance
For more than two hours on Friday morning, (click here) much of the web seemed to grind to a halt—or at least slow to dial-up speed—for many users in the United States.
More than a dozen major websites experienced outages and other technical problems, according to user reports and the web-tracking site downdetector.com. They included The New York Times, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast, EA, the Playstation network, and others.
How was it possible to take down all those sites at once?
Someone attacked the architecture that held them together—the domain-name system, or DNS, the technical network that redirects users from easy-to-remember addresses like theatlantic.com to a company’s actual web servers....
Perhaps there needs to be two internets; one within the USA borders and one that is metered and connected to the USA infrastructure.
October 22, 2016
By Elizabeth Weise
San Francisco — Technology experts (click here) warned for years that the millions of Internet-connected "smart" devices we use every day are weak, easily hijacked and could be turned against us.
The massive siege on Dyn, a New Hampshire-based company that monitors and routes Internet traffic, shows those ominous predictions are now a reality.
An unknown attacker intermittently knocked many popular websites offline for hours Friday, from Amazon to Twitter and Netflix to Etsy. How the breach occurred is a cautionary tale of the how the rush to make humdrum devices “smart” while sometimes leaving out crucial security can have major consequences.
Dyn, a provider of Internet management for multiple companies, was hit with a large-scale distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), in which its servers were flooded with millions of fake requests for information, so many that they could no longer respond to real ones and crashed under the weight....
DNS for Dummies (click here)
