Dyn Attack

At 11:52 a.m. Tuesday UTC, Dyn, a worldwide Domain Name System (DNS) and email delivery company, underwent a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, according to the company’s recent blog post.

In an effort to prevent more damage from being done, Dyn disabled lookups later that day to two sites, and both of those sites were still inaccessible as the company attempted to mitigate further until 8:16 p.m. UTC when one site became operable again.

Dyn worked with unspecified upstream providers (services used to upload information to the Internet and send data to a particular location) to quell the attack traffic.

Finally, around 3 a.m. UTC the following morning, the attack traffic subsided and Dyn was able to return to normal functions.

By shutting down a DNS, a hacker could essentially stop, or at least slow, service to a number of websites using that particular DNS.

A DNS acts as a sort of phone book for the Internet, translating recognizable names (domain names) into Internet Protocol addresses (IP addresses), the communication language of computers.

So when someone attacks a DNS, they are basically grabbing a phonebook and trying to scribble on the pages, making it impossible to find Aunt Marge’s phone number.

However, now the phonebook has been repaired and is fully functioning again.