THESE ARE STRANGE TIMES INDEED…
Remember a few weeks go when the internet was ceded to the world When Obama said that the United States was done? It was signed over to an international consortium of nations–many of which don’t believe in free speech or true journalism.
Starting early this morning, the East Coast started having trouble surfing the web. The West Coast was hit in the afternoon..
Major sites like Spotify, Amazon, and Twitter were hit with outages..
It became a big deal as time went on.. The biggest websites seemed to be hit with a DDOS attack..
There are reports as I write this post that the US Department of Homeland Security is on the case, investigating the now major disruption of the world wide web across the United States.
Three weeks from election.
From winter..
And without much media attention except for a passing glance.
The outages appear to have resulted from a “distributed denial of services” attack on web hosting firm Dyn. Firms such as Dyn “act as the internet’s phone book and facilitate your request to go to a certain webpage and make sure you are taken to the right place. If the (domain name server) provider that handles requests for Twitter is down, well, good luck getting to Twitter,” explains Gizmodo.
The outages were primarily across the United States. It was purposely done.. This map from DownDetector.com proving the denial of service hit..
THE NEW YORK TIMES is reporting this troubling detail:
The company, Dyn, whose servers monitor and reroute internet traffic, said it began experiencing what security experts called a distributed denial-of-service attack just after 7 a.m. Reports that many sites were inaccessible started on the East Coast, but spread westward in three waves as the day wore on and into the evening.
And in a troubling development, the attack appears to have relied on hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices like cameras, baby monitors and home routers that have been infected — without their owners’ knowledge — with software that allows hackers to command them to flood a target with overwhelming traffic.
The FBI said late today that it was looking into this as a criminal activity issue or a nation state attack..
Only weeks from an election….
As the Russia/Wikileaks/Trump accusations wildly flew at the latest debate..
Strange times to live in.
There is wild speculation around the global WEB tonight that the hit today was just a practice run.. just a dry run.. just an attempt to see how things played out. The real breach may be election day, we are told.. This is just a warm up, some fear.. From the DAILY MAIL:
A massive co-ordinated series of cyber attacks has forced hundreds of major websites from Amazon to Twitter offline across the globe – and WikiLeaks believes its supporters were responsible.
It urged its backers to ‘stop taking down the US internet’, saying ‘Mr Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing’.
It then tweeted: ‘The Obama administration should not have attempted to misuse its instruments of state to stop criticism of its ruling party candidate.’
The Ecuadorian government switched off Assange’s internet service Sunday after he released another tranche of emails showing the contents of a speech given by Hillary Clinton to Goldman Sachs.
A WILD DAY ON THE PLANET EARTH!
I said to a friend today during the NET blackout: Imagine if we would have talked about this 20 years.. imagine if we would have said a few “websites” would have gone down! Laughable we would say..! Ridiculous we’d conjecture..
but real it is..
real indeed..
Very real when big sites that we rely on go down..
Or……major servers on an election day where voters rely on technology to record their decisions.
