Cyber attacks which hit Twitter, Netflix and Spotify could be ‘practice for election night’
The major cyber attack via webcams - linked to WikiLeaks supporters - flooded websites with junk traffic
A MASSIVE cyber attack which crippled some of the world's best known websites "could be practice for the US Election Day".
Yesterday Twitter, Paypal and Spotify were hit when attackers targeted the infrastructure company Dyn, which acts as a switchboard for internet traffic.
Millions of internet connected devices such as webcams, baby monitors and digital recorders were used after being infected with a malicious code.
Sites were flooded with so much junk traffic that they froze up for several hours.
The Department of Homeland Security has launched an urgent investigation into Friday's crash.
Political commentator Keith Olbermann fears it could be a precursor to an attack on US Election Day on November 8.
He tweeted: "Say, not to panic anybody, but what if the (attacks) today were practice for 11/8?"
The White House called the disruption malicious and a hacker group claimed responsibility, .
WikiLeaks feared its supporters were responsible and urged them to "stop taking down the US internet", saying: 'Mr Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing.'
It also tweeted: 'The Obama administration should not have attempted to misuse its instruments of state to stop criticism of its ruling party candidate.'
Users complained they could not reach destinations including Mashable, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Yelp and some businesses hosted by Amazon.com Inc.
Security experts said it was a distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS.
Targets get flooded with so much junk traffic that they freeze up, .
Malicious traffic was coming from connected devices that had been infected with control software named Mirai.
This dodgy code dumped on the net a month ago has been used by criminals.
Dyn’s chief strategy officer Kyle York said: "The complexity of the attacks is what’s making it very challenging for us."
The outages left internet users unable to post messages, shop, watch videos and play games online for parts of the day.
The attack was resolved within two hours but then Dyn, based in New Hampshire, USA, was slammed with a second DDos wave.
Carbon Black national security strategist Eric O'Neill, a former FBI "spy hunter", said: "This is not some hacker sitting in his basement typing away on a keyboard."
Matthew Prince, CEO of security and content delivery firm CloudFlare said: "Dyn can't simply block the (Internet Protocol) addresses they are seeing, because that would be blocking Google or OpenDNS.
"These are nasty attacks, some of the hardest to protect against."
The disruptions come at a time of unprecedented fears about the cyber threat in the United States.
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