Bull Session
Internet Takedown
October 27, 2016
Episode Summary
On The Digital Life podcast this week, we discuss the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) that took down the Internet on the East Coast for a sustained period of time last Friday. Dyn, a Domain Name System (DNS) services company from New Hampshire was hit with multiple waves of attacks on its Internet directory servers.
This DDoS attack was propagated by an IoT botnet — essentially webcams, DVRs, and routers from all over the world — that were infected with malware. This is a very public example of an IoT outcome that was malicious rather than beneficial, an interesting case study for this emerging technology that raises serious questions about its future implementation.
Resources:
What We Know About Friday’s Massive East Coast Internet Outage