DNS provider Dyn hit by DDoS attack that takes out major sites

Some of the biggest names on the internet – including Twitter, GitHub, Etsy, Shopify, the New York Times and the Boston Globe, among many others – were temporarily knocked offline by a DDoS attack that targeted DNS provider Dyn early Friday morning.

DNS is the mechanism by which computers turn human-readable web addresses like www.networkworld.com into a numerical format that can be used to retrieve the actual web page. Dyn is a managed DNS provider – essentially, a phone book that computers use to correlate IP addresses to web page names.

Overloading the company’s services with a denial-of-service attack means that a lot of queries simply fail to resolve, so users get 404s and other errors instead of Twitter or Shopify. Dyn has posted a statement saying that the majority of the ill effects were felt in the Eastern U.S., and that the main impact is to its managed DNS customers in the area.

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