U.S. internet disrupted by cyberattacks

Hackers spread across Russia, China claim responsibility for act.

LONDON — Cyberattacks on a key internet firm repeatedly disrupted the availability of popular websites across the United States Friday, according to analysts and company officials.

The White House described the disruption as malicious. Members of a hacker group spread across China and Russia claimed responsibility, although their assertion couldn’t be verified.

Manchester, N.H.-based Dyn Inc. said its server infrastructure was hit by distributed denial-of-service attacks, which work by overwhelming targeted machines with junk data traffic. The attack had knock-on effects for users trying to access popular websites across America and even in Europe, affecting popular online services including Twitter, Netflix and PayPal.

The level of disruption was difficult to gauge, but Dyn provides

internet traffic management and optimization services to some of the biggest names on the web. Critically, Dyn provides domain name services, which translate the human-readable addresses such as “twitter.com” into an online route for browsers and applications.

Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at Intel Security, compared an outage at a domain name services company to tearing up a map or turning off GPS before driving to the department store.

“It doesn’t matter that the store is fully open or operational if you have no idea how to get there,” he said.

Jason Read, founder of the internet performance monitoring firm CloudHarmony, owned by Gartner Inc., said his company tracked a halfhour-long disruption early Friday in which roughly one in two end users would have found it impossible to access various websites from the East Coast. A second attack later in the day caused disruption to the East and West coasts as well as impacting some users in Europe.

“It’s been pretty busy for those guys,” Read said. “We’ve been monitoring Dyn for years and this is by far the worst outage event that we’ve observed.”

Read said Dyn provides services to some 6 percent of America’s Fortune 500 companies.

“It impacted quite a few users,” he said of the morning’s attack.

A full list of affected companies wasn’t immediately available, but Twitter, Netflix, PayPal and the coder hangout Github said they briefly experienced problems earlier Friday.

Members of a shadowy collective that calls itself New World Hackers claimed responsibility for the attack via Twitter. They said they organized networks of connected “zombie” computers that threw a staggering 1.2 terabits per second of data at the Dyn-managed servers.

“We didn’t do this to attract federal agents, only test power,” two collective members who identified themselves as “Prophet” and “Zain” said via Twitter direct message exchange.

They said more than 10 members participated in the attack. It was not immediately possible to verify the claim.

Dyn officials said they did not know who was behind the attacks or if they were orchestrated by a statebacked group or online activists or pranksters. They said they have received no claim of responsibility, but were working with law enforcement.

The collective, @NewWorldHacking on Twitter, has claimed responsibility for similar attacks against sites including ESPNFantasySports.com in September and the BBC on Dec. 31. The attack on the BBC marshalled half the computing power of Friday’s onslaught.

The collective also has claimed responsibility for cyberattacks against the Islamic State. “Prophet” and “Zain” said about 30 people have access to the @ NewWorkdHacking Twitter account. They said 20 are in Russia and 10 in China. “Prophet” said he was in India. “Zain” said he was in China.

Another collective member the who previously communicated via direct message called himself “Ownz” and identified himself as a 19-year-old in London. He said the group — or at least he — sought through hacking only to expose security vulnerabilities.

During the attack on the ESPN site, “Ownz” was asked if the collective made any demands on sites it attacked, such as demanding blackmail money. “We will make one demand actually: Secure your website and get better servers, otherwise be attacked again,” he said.

For James Norton, the former deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security who now teaches on cybersecurity policy at Johns Hopkins University, the incident was an example of how attacks on key junctures in the network can yield massive disruption.

CONTRIBUTED Twitter, PayPal and Netflix were among the popular websites affected by the internet disruptions.