A major cyberattack Friday affected major brands and websites including Amazon, Twitter and Spotify. New Hampshire-based software company Dyn was at the heart of it all.
Dyn offers managed DNS and email delivery services to other companies. Essentially, the service works like Yellowpages, Gary Merry, CEO of Baltimore-based cybersecurity company Deep Run Security. When a person types a URL into their browser, a DNS service acts as a middle man. It takes the request and “resolves” it, or directs the user on a path to their desired website.
The company on Friday suffered a denial-of-service attack.
That happens when servers are swarmed, or are fielding millions and millions of the same request — in this case, requests for sites like Twitter or Amazon. The servers go into a kind of “panic.” They are overwhelmed and can’t meet all of the requests at once, so they lock up and stop resolving any requests, Merry explained to me during an interview at the CyberMaryland Conference.
And when Dyn servers can’t resolve those requests, users are met with a blank screen instead of the website they’re searching for.
“So we say Twitter is ‘down.’ But actually Twitter is functioning perfectly well, you just can’t get to it,” Merry said. “Basically, Twitter just doesn’t exist for a while.” For the full article click here
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