Cyber attacks shut down Twitter, other websites in U.S. East
                 Source: Xinhua | 2016-10-22 03:57:52 | Editor: huaxia

This file photo taken on September 12, 2013 shows the Yahoo logo seen on a smartphone. Yahoo faced pressure September 23, 2016 to explain how it sustained a massive cyber-attack -- one of the biggest ever, and allegedly state-sponsored -- allowing hackers to steal data from half a billion users two years ago. (AFP PHOTO/KAREN BLEIER)

WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) -- Twitter and some other major websites were shut down on the U.S. East Coast for several hours on Friday as an American Internet service provider called Dyn and Amazon's web services unit were hit by waves of cyber attacks.

Dyn, headquartered in New Hampshire, said in posts on its website that its Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack starting at 7:10 a.m. EDT.

A DDoS attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources, and the company said the attack is "mainly impacting U.S. East."

About two hours later, Dyn said "services have been restored to normal."

But it wasn't over. The company confirmed that a second DDoS attack took place at 11:52 a.m. EDT.

"This DDoS attack may also be impacting Dyn Managed DNS advanced services with possible delays in monitoring," it said.

In an update posted at about 2 p.m., Dyn said its engineers "continue to investigate and mitigate several attacks aimed against the Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure."

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a unit of Amazon.com that hosts many of the web's popular destinations including Netflix, reported an attack that also affected people on the U.S. East Coast around the same time in the morning.

"Between 4:31 AM and 6:10 AM PDT, we experienced errors resolving the DNS hostnames used to access some AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region," the company said on its website.

But this issue has been resolved and the service is now operating normally, it noted.

Currently, it's unknown who was behind the attacks.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is monitoring this situation and will take a close look at it.

"But at this point, I don't have any information to share about who may be responsible for that malicious activity," Earnest told reporters.
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Cyber attacks shut down Twitter, other websites in U.S. East

Source: Xinhua 2016-10-22 03:57:52

This file photo taken on September 12, 2013 shows the Yahoo logo seen on a smartphone. Yahoo faced pressure September 23, 2016 to explain how it sustained a massive cyber-attack -- one of the biggest ever, and allegedly state-sponsored -- allowing hackers to steal data from half a billion users two years ago. (AFP PHOTO/KAREN BLEIER)

WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) -- Twitter and some other major websites were shut down on the U.S. East Coast for several hours on Friday as an American Internet service provider called Dyn and Amazon's web services unit were hit by waves of cyber attacks.

Dyn, headquartered in New Hampshire, said in posts on its website that its Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack starting at 7:10 a.m. EDT.

A DDoS attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources, and the company said the attack is "mainly impacting U.S. East."

About two hours later, Dyn said "services have been restored to normal."

But it wasn't over. The company confirmed that a second DDoS attack took place at 11:52 a.m. EDT.

"This DDoS attack may also be impacting Dyn Managed DNS advanced services with possible delays in monitoring," it said.

In an update posted at about 2 p.m., Dyn said its engineers "continue to investigate and mitigate several attacks aimed against the Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure."

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a unit of Amazon.com that hosts many of the web's popular destinations including Netflix, reported an attack that also affected people on the U.S. East Coast around the same time in the morning.

"Between 4:31 AM and 6:10 AM PDT, we experienced errors resolving the DNS hostnames used to access some AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region," the company said on its website.

But this issue has been resolved and the service is now operating normally, it noted.

Currently, it's unknown who was behind the attacks.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is monitoring this situation and will take a close look at it.

"But at this point, I don't have any information to share about who may be responsible for that malicious activity," Earnest told reporters.
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