Many of the world's most popular websites were inaccessible
across several parts of the United States on Friday. This was as a result of the wave of hackers attack on a company that acts as a switchboard for the
internet.
Access to websites such as Paypal,
Spotify, Twitter and other customers of the infrastructure company in New
Hampshire called Dyn, which processes large volumes of internet traffic were affected.
Other websites that were attacked and affected included top names like CNN, New York Times, AirBnB, Reddit, HBO and many more sites.
"Dyn acts as a middle man that directs users to different websites
and routes traffic from server to server in a complex way.
According to Al jazeera's correspondent,The attackers used hundreds of thousands of
internet-connected devices that had previously been infected with a
malicious code that allowed them to cause outages. "This type of attack is known as is a distributed denial of
service attack (DDoS)," explained our correspondent. "They used affected
computers to fire requests at the servers of Dyn simultaneously and
essentially overwhelm it."
York said that at least some of the malicious traffic was
coming from connected devices, including webcams and digital video
recorders, that had been infected with control software named Mirai.
Security researchers have previously raised concerns that
such connected devices, sometimes referred to as the Internet of Things,
lack proper security.
