The most ironic thing about this massive internet attack
Knowing a lot about something doesn't always mean you can stop it.
Two days before a massive distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) shut down a huge chunk of the internet on Friday, a researcher at the server provider under assault gave a presentation on just that kind of attack.
Friday's attack was directed at Dyn, a firm that hosts domain name systems.
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Domain name systems are hugely important. When you type in the name of a website, domain name systems are what direct the site back to your screen. Without them, websites are still up and running, but you can't see them.
Major websites such as Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, Seamless and a ton of others were therefore inaccessible for large amounts of the day. Even as they intermittently came back, the websites moved as though internet speed had been transported back to the late 1990s.
A distributed denial of service attack is an internet assault that essentially overloads a server with traffic to the point that everyday users can no longer gain access.
Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Dyn Research, was giving a presentation on DDoS attacks in Dallas on Oct. 19.
He and independent cybersecurity reporter Daniel Krebs had recently published a report that got behind the scenes of some of the "largest DDoS attacks the internet has ever seen."
Madory and Krebs are intimately familiar with DDoS attacks. Just after they published that report in September, Krebs' website found itself under attack from what was then the biggest DDoS attack in the history of the Internet.
"The size of these DDoS attacks has increased so much lately thanks largely to the broad availability of tools for compromising and leveraging the collective firepower of so-called Internet of Things devices — poorly secured Internet-based security cameras, digital video recorders (DVRs) and internet routers," Kregs wrote on his website on Friday.
The size of the attack on Krebs' site has already been surpassed, and no one yet knows the extent of Friday's attack.
We do know Dyn is familiar with these kinds of attacks, but that didn't stop Friday's DDoS from knocking down a huge part of the internet.
Colin is Mashable's US & World Reporter. He previously interned at Foreign Policy magazine and The American Prospect. Colin is a graduate from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When he's not at Mashable, you can most likely find him eating or playing some kind of sport.
