Increase in International Cyber Attacks Calls for National Testbed

HSD Foundation | The Hague Security Delta | October 24, 2016

On Friday 21st of October The United States was subjected to massive and widespread cyberattacks which disrupted website domains and internet traffic through DDoS attacks. DDoS attacks flood websites with traffic and impairs normal services. "The massive outage drew the attention of the FBI which said Friday that it was "investigating all potential causes" of the attack." Popular websites like Twitter, Amazon, Spotify and Netflix went down for some users on Friday.

Target of the attacks was Dyn, a company that offers direct internet traffic to multiple sites on the internet. It is not clear why Dyn was targeted but the effect temporarily shut down America's biggest companies websites. On Friday morning, local New York time, Dyn reported the first attack, a couple of hours later the servers went down again.

For now the conclusions seem to be that no computers are hacked. Smart living products like smart TV's are often badly secured. Hackers know this and have found their way through these devices. Experts have expressed that these widespread cyber attacks are related to tenthousands of badly secured gadgets like webcams, babyphones and digital videorecorders. Security experts say these kind of attacks are just a small indication of what is to come. Recently a hacker released a softwarecode which enables these kind of attacks...