The robots are invading the online world. They are riding on common household electronic items to get in to a consumer’s computer system. It is like another Trojan war strategy for this digital age.
There has been a massive denial-of-service attacks played on several major websites. Common gadgets like webcams and digital recorders are used by the online hijackers to deploy malware on the enterprise’s computer system affecting the normal operation of its website.
Huge names in the online community came out as victims of these malicious activities. PayPal is definitely one of these names. Twitter and Spotify were also victimized. The suspected culprit was a company called Dyn. It is a support company providing Internet services to many of these websites. Its office is located in New Hampshire.
The attacks were said to have begun in the east coast where several websites were experiencing recurring service outages on their site operations. Then, the attacks spread across the entire country and reached until Europe.
There were also some complaints about users’ inability to access several news sites and some Amazon – hosted business enterprises. CNN, New York Times and Wall Street Journal are three huge names that came out in this report.
Dyn had responded to the allegations saying that the attacks came from multiple sources. The criminals were using several devices connected to Internet which had been infected with the malware that distributes this DDoS attack interrupting traffic on its target websites making them unavailable to online consumers.
Dyn was able to fix the first of three attacks. A second attack followed suit and disturbed its operations for about two hours. A third attack came in the evening of the same day.
The intention of these attacks is to overcome a company’s server with a surge of unknown traffic from the Internet so that it becomes crippled by the unexpected number of requests for service coming in. This renders the site unable to accommodate all request making it unavailable to some users.
The good thing about these attacks is that it uses webcams and video recorders which can easily be disconnected from the computer when an attack is detected.
Investigators suspect a certain Chinese company to be behind these attacks. This company is a manufacturer of CCTV cameras. These cameras are capable of Internet connectivity and had been allegedly linked to the attacks.
Many U.S. research firms are strong about their accusations but the Chinese company made no comments about it.
Security researchers in the United States are claiming that some foreign country is behind all these online attacks. They are suspecting China and Russia to be the masters of this plot but they just could not prove them to be so.
