Ddos Attack On Dyn

On October 21, 2016, Dyn, a company located in New Hampshire, that monitors and routes internet traffic became a victim of a massive DDoS attack. Although it is uncertain who was behind the DDoS attack, security experts are certain that a program called Mirai was used to initiate the DDoS attack on Dyn (Blumenthal & Weise, 2016). Because of the DDoS attack, some users were not able to access their social media, entertainment, music, and other sites such as Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, Tumblr, Netflix, PayPal, and many other sites. The attack started at around 7 am, when Dyn released a message on their website stating that they “began to monitor and mitigate a DDoS attack against their Dyn managed DNS infrastructure” (Blumenthal & Weise, 2016).

Weak authentication essentially means that the strength of the authentication method is weaker than the importance of what the system is protecting. In this case of DDoS attacks, the usernames and passwords had been hardcoded into the system or used default ones that made security for them weak. By exploiting this vulnerability the botnet was able to infect the system and go into the controls where they made the traffic coming in appear offline. Another vulnerability is the unsecure communication between devices. This essentially comes down to the main principles of cybersecurity. Authentication/identification (where each device needs to identify themselves) confidentiality (where all data, whether in physical, software or cloud, is encrypted to protect from any hack) integrity (protect data from unauthorized changes) and non repudiation (proof that the data has not been altered or changed in any way). The most crucial vulnerability existed in the way that the DNS functions. The system was struggling to update its systems in many aspects, including its one factor authentication, unencrypted web connections and unmonitored connections. During the DDoS attack, the attacker sent large packets to saturate the bandwidth in order to exhaust the network's capacity. A limited bandwidth is also another vulnerability that can be easily exploited if

The weak authentication vulnerability was given a rating of 8 since many people could crack this if they find the code. This is a relatively easy task. The next vulnerability, lack of device security, was given a rating of 9 since each device now served as a vulnerability that hackers could hack with ease. This deserved the higher rating as it is more risk, but less protection. A lack of network monitoring or control and limited bandwidth and targeted resources are large vulnerability, but it would take more expertise to execute an attack based on this vulnerability; so it is given a lower rating of 6 because it is more unlikely than weak authentication and lack of device