In case you weren’t aware, half the internet got wiped out by a massive cyber attack last Friday as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on popular domain name system (DNS) provider called Dyn.
Though it brought down (or at least screwed up) access to popular sites like Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, Netflix and a whole lot more for internet users in the United States, local telcom operator StarHub said that they were hit too. In fact, they’ve confirmed that the massive DDoS attack was the cause of the service disruptions that affected their broadband customers on Oct 22 and Oct 24.
Yesterday, StarHub posted that they experienced “intentional and likely malicious” DDoS attacks on their DNS servers. It’s unclear who exactly initiated the attacks, but the flood of fake traffic overwhelmed the servers of Dyn, taking it to a grinding halt for a few hours. So far, Dyn has been hit by three waves of attacks that caused massive outages for internet users around the world, including Singapore.
“No impact was observed on the rest of our services, and the security of our customers’ information was not compromised,” assured StarHub, noting that the attacks were “unprecedented in scale, nature and complexity”. In other words, shit got pretty serious for the internet service providers in the backend, even as hundreds of customers flooded their Facebook page with complaints.
“We continue to stay vigilant against possible follow-up DDoS attempts. In addition, we are working closely with the authorities to determine intent and source of these two DDoS attacks.”
US President Barack Obama recently admitted his security chiefs remain stumped as to who co-ordinated the sophisticated cyber-attacks that crippled more than 80 popular websites. Dyn revealed that the attack began with a malware-infected botnet that allowed tens of millions of IP addresses to be commandeered.
