“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.
Sarah Anderson lays out one area where being a “know-it-all” is actually pretty dangerous. Unfortunately, many cybersecurity professionals either refuse or fail to accept the basic premise that he/she does not and cannot know everything. This failure or refusal is dangerous as cybersecurity requires a constant education and re-education from uncommon sources – news, Twitter,…
In response to yesterday’s post about all of the various things we see being shared all over the internet, Steven Vore reminded me that Snopes.com is your friend. If you’re not familiar with Snopes.com, you really should be. Snopes is THE place to go and seek out the truth about things before you start sharing…
For its part, LinkedIn is revamping the feature by giving it added relevance. What this means is your endorsements will be highlighted based on the person viewing your profile. For example, viewers will see endorsements made by mutual connections, colleagues, and people who actually have some experience with that particular skill (like expert gum chewers, for…
As we head into the metaverse, or whatever the cool kids are calling it this week, this is only going to become more complex and more necessary. It won’t just be a social media profile and photos, it’ll be an entire identity in the crypto-blockchain space that will not be accessible to someone else without the appropriate transfer. Don’t leave it to chance. Your family is going to be dealing with enough.
The problem is that to many people involved in litigation, this is too much work: “When requesting parties want all search hits in an email mailbox containing a common search term, they are asking for trouble. Requesting communications between specific people, over a set period of time, regarding specific subject matter, is one way to…
Given the news last night that Google is stopping development of Notebook, let’s start the argument, Zoho Notebook or Evernote? Which one is going to be better suited to my to-do lists, brainstorming notes, gift ideas lists, and other random tid-bits of information that I like to keep organized in a OneNote like structure, but…
