On 21 October 2016, major online news media platforms, entertainment and business websites were shutdown throughout the day with a massive distributed denial of service (DDos) attack on United States .
According to Dyn DNS Company, a major domain name system (DNS) manager for the East Coast, reported that its domain name service infrastructure came under attack starting around 7:10 a.m. It said service was restored to normal a little over two hours later, at 9:20 a.m. In a post made shortly after 2 p.m., Dyn acknowledged a second wave attacks was underway. The DNS service provider then announced that its own monitoring service was also experiencing issues. “Customers may notice incorrect probe alerts on their advanced DNS services,” the company wrote shortly before 2:30. Dyn said the attacks were continuing as of 3:43 p.m.
In simple words, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack occurs when multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually one or more web servers. Such an attack is often the result of multiple compromised systems (for example, a botnet) flooding the targeted system with traffic. DDoS attacks work by blocking the ability of users to pull up the website addresses. While the services themselves are typically working fine, users are unable to access them.
DDoS attacks are increasing in frequency, and will likely continue to do so until network operators around the globe take additional steps to reduce IP spoofing.
