This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply. Quite a few websites and services (Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, etc.) are down today after a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the DNS provider Dyn occurred this morning. Gizmodo has the full list of sites and more information: Domain Name Servers (DNS) act as the internet’s phone book. Basically, they facilitate your request to go to a certain webpage and make sure you are taken to the right place. If the DNS provider that handles requests for Twitter is down, well, good luck getting to Twitter. Some websites are coming back for some users, but it doesn’t look like the problem is fully resolved. Expand - View Original
This is actually pretty unnerving. Also, why the NHL? What did hockey ever do to anyone except be awesome?
Distributed Denial of Service attack. Basically the attacker floods the host with a lot of requests in order to overload the server/website.
The attack was against a Dyn, a DNS provider, not these websites directly. Distributed Denial Of Service attack. It's just flooding the target with more requests than it can handle.
Pretty glad I stopped using Spotify because lord knows I couldn't make it through the morning without streaming
The short answer is probably not - by themselves, DDoS attacks don't typically compromise user data. It's concerning that a DDoS attack on a single DNS provider is having such a widespread effect though, and symptomatic of a larger problem - that security is typically an afterthought for a lot of tech companies.