Attacks on web provider disrupt sites on US East Coast

WASHINGTON: Cyber attacks targeting the Internet infrastructure provider Dyn disrupted service on major sites such as Twitter and Spotify on Friday, mainly affecting users on the US East Coast.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible and Gillian Christensen of the US Department of Homeland Security said the agency was “investigating all potential causes.”

Dyn said it had resolved one attack, which disrupted operations for about two hours, but disclosed a second attack a few hours later that was causing further disruptions.

In addition to the social network Twitter and music-streamer Spotify, the discussion site Reddit, hospitality booking service Airbnb and The Verge news site were among the companies whose services were reported to be down.

Amazon.com Inc’s web services division, one of the world’s biggest cloud computing companies, also disclosed an outage that lasted several hours on Friday morning. Amazon could not immediately be reached for comment.

The attacks were the latest in an increasingly menacing string of distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks disrupting Internet sites by overwhelming servers with web traffic.

The US Department of Homeland Security warned on October 14 that hackers were using a powerful new approach to launch these campaigns — infecting routers, printers, smart TVs and other connected devices with malware that turns them into “bot” armies that can launch DDoS attacks.

“We have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure,” the company said on its website. “Our engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.” — Reuters