""Internet traffic company Dyn on Friday warned of another cyber attack after earlier in the day websites and services across the East Coast were shut down.
"We have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed (Domain Name System) infrastructure. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue," Dyn said on its website at 11:52 a.m
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is when a web service is intentionally overwhelmed by traffic from many sources. It is a common method for digital assaults.
Dyn said the attack may also impact "Dyn Managed DNS advanced services with possible delays in monitoring."
The Department of Homeland Security told CNBC that it is "looking into all potential causes" of the attack. NBC News reported that one U.S. intelligence official said North Korea had been ruled out as a suspect.
The White House said U.S. authorities are monitoring reports of attack on the internet services company and whether it is a "criminal act," according to Reuters.
Many prominent websites including Amazon ,
Twitter, Spotify and CNBC.com were shut down for two hours Friday morning by an earlier denial of service attack. Amazon reported later that it was once again having service issues.
Dyn said the earlier attack started at 7:10 a.m. It affected Dyn's Managed DNS infrastructure, which is the system that directs users to the correct webpage.
Dyn said the services had been restored to normal after the initial attack by 9:20 a.m.
It was not known who was behind the distributed denial of service attack.''
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/21/major-websites-across-east-coast-knocked-out-in-apparent-ddos-attack.html

Cue The Twilight Zone theme music

because of the complexity and money required to truly mitigate a DDoS attack they are used quite frequently.

DDoS attacks are also one of Anonymous's favorite tools.

They are also hard to track because often the machines used to generate traffic are peoples home computers that have been infected by Bots so generally the owner of the computer is unaware that their computer took part in the attack.

The only true way to mitigate it, is with traffic baselines and normalization flows.

The cyber security community is still trying to figure out a way to prevent these attacks...but in truth there isn't a way yet. The only thing you can do is build an infrastructure large enough to handle massive amounts of traffic, however, even then if the bad guys can up their game and generate an insane amount of traffic then they will succeed in overwhelming the organization.

Russia and China have been carrying out cyber attacks for years, although both publicly deny it.

If you want an interesting read, check out the Mandiant Report, the original one that was released in 2013...kind of gives insight into how they track these types of threats.

Thanks for the info Isaac....I didn't wanna go....um...Russian to judgement

Is that Mandiant report from the cyber security company Mandiant? Just curious...I assume so

I guess someone didn't like some of the Contents on those Sites!