“This sort of attack is deeply different than the headline-grabbing DDoS attacks of years past. In 2011, hacker collective Anonymous rose to fame with DDoS attacks that pale in comparison to today’s attack on Dyn. Instead of taking out an individual website for short periods of time, hackers were able to take down a major piece of the internet backbone for an entire morning—not once but twice. That’s huge.
If hackers are more easily able to amass extensive DDoS botnets, that means the internet as we know it becomes more vulnerable. Attacking major internet infrastructure like Dyn has always been a possibility, but if it becomes easier than ever to launch huge DDoS attacks, that means we might be seeing some of our favorite sites have more downtime than usual. These attacks could extend to other major pieces of internet infrastructure, causing even more widespread outages.
This could be the beginning of a very bleak future. If hackers are able to take down the internet at will, what happens next? It’s unclear how long it could take for the folks at Dyn to fix this problem, or if they will ever be able to solve the problem of being hit with a huge DDoS attack. But this new breed of DDoS attacks is a scary problem no matter how you look at it.”
What happened yesterday was scary. Because with all of these insecure devices out there, it’s clear we are seeing a serious uptick in the ability of hackers to disable parts of the internet, and how much do we depend on parts of the internet now? Quite a lot.
It’s time to start punishing the producers of insecure devices. They are a menace.
Also known as random stuff I found interesting recently. Whisperly let’s you anonymously tweet. Just send a DM to the Whisperly account, and it’ll get tweeted out anonymously. I suppose you could have fun with it, proclaim your secret admiration for someone, or you could just plain be mean. Like anything, it’s up to the…
I’ve been using a couple of AddThis plugins on this site recently, in an effort to make it easier for folks to share things that they find interesting on the site, or to encourage folks to share or like the Facebook page, etc. Tonight, however, I’m deactivating AddThis on the site. The reason? This article…
Stefanie’s list of questions is a good place to start for really anyone. “Who – who specifically does it help? What – what problem does it solve? When – do you know the right time to post it on social for maximum reach? Where – are you posting it on the right channels where your…
Are They Trying to Screw Me? tags: MM LitSupport OSU Marching Band Delivers Impressive Half-Time Tribute to Video Games tags: MM humor Proximity Searches Can Be the Right Balance of Recall and Precision tags: LitSupport MM Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. Follow these topics: Links
The reason I added anonymity above is that is the other suggestion I see often about how to “clean up” social media. The theory is that if everyone had to use their real name and prove who they are, they’d behave better.
If you’ve looked at Facebook or even LinkedIn lately, you might look at that suggestion with some skepticism. You’d be right to.
But, more importantly, as they say above, vulnerable people need not only the freedom to speak, but the freedom to do it anonymously.
Pop quiz: Can you rattle off the number of your favorite credit card? Extra credit: What about the customer identification number on the back of the same card? That second three- or four-digit code has been known to trip up even the greatest credit card connoisseurs on occasion, but that’s sort of the point, as it’s…
