By DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTHOCT. 22, 2016
Continue reading the main story
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The attack on the infrastructure of the internet, which made it all but impossible at times to check Twitter feeds or headlines, was a remarkable reminder about how billions of ordinary web-connected devices — many of them highly insecure — can be turned to vicious purposes. And the threats will continue long after Election Day for a nation that increasingly keeps its data in the cloud and has oftentimes kept its head in the sand.
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But hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions, of those security cameras and other devices have been infected with a fairly simple program that guessed at their factory-set passwords — often “admin” or “12345” or even, yes, “password” — and, once inside, turned them into an army of simple robots. Each one was commanded, at a coordinated time, to bombard a small company in Manchester, N.H., called Dyn DNS with messages that overloaded its circuits.
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- Cyber attacks disrupt Twitter, Spotify, other sites on East Coast (thegazette.com)
- ‘Massive’ Cyberattack Hits U.S. Servers, Affects Twitter, Reddit and Other Sites (truthdig.com)
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- How a Bunch of Hacked DVR Machines Took Down Twitter and Reddit (theatlantic.com)
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