I am a bit late to the party, but in case you have not heard about it, there was a specific reason why the east coast suffered an internet outage during Friday, October 21st. We tend to claim we are quite prepared for the future, hacking-wise. All these openings and promotions for cyber security should be enough, right? Not. Regardless of how many cybersecurity graduates the United States produces each year –even if it increases exponentially– it will never be enough to stop cyber wars. Now, going back to the internet outage, what happened was that your favorite security companies were not able to successfully defend against a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS attack) that happened against Dyn, a domain server name (DNS) company. This is why you could not check your social media during October 21st.
Let us define a few terms for clarification: DDoS attack and DNS. A DDoS attack takes place when a cyber-perpetrator achieves the suspension of an online service –or services– for an undefined amount of time, hence “Denial of Service.” On the other hand, DNS simply refers to an “online book.” When you type in facebook.com in your address bar, this domain name is translated by the DNS company (in our case, Dyn), which allows you to connect easily to the desired web page.
Surprised enough that your conformity was disturbed that easily? That you were deprived of the use of internet in a blink of an eye? Probably not. I mean, it was fixed, right? Sure it was, but are we forgetting that the attack was done by using surveillance cameras? Oh wait; I never mentioned that, did I? Simple security cameras, now found almost everywhere, were the doom of Dyn.
I have probably mentioned it before in few of my articles, but we are certainly heading towards a dangerous future. Yahoo has already been hacked once, in 2014, affecting half a million users. However, Yahoo is not the only big company that has been hacked: Ebay, Adobe, MySpace, UPS, AT&T, LinkedIn, and many more have also suffered attacks. While these are actual hacks and infiltrations, other companies, such as Dyn, suffer from DDoS attacks. The point is, the internet is not as safe as we think.
Getting worried yet? Your twelve-year-old neighbor could probably hack into your Wi-Fi and steal all your passwords with free available software on the internet. Sorry, that probably did not help. But now you know, right? You can easily protect yourself against what the future is to come. Simply commit yourself to learning computers, and what they can do. Understand your network and the flow of information. No, you do not need to be a coding expert or a cyber-security major to understand what your devices do and cannot do. I will not lie, though; it would certainly help.
In few of my next articles, I will provide useful information that can help you identify perpetrators (or bored twelve-year-olds) trying to break into your Wi-Fi. I shall focus on giving advice for a better tomorrow, but for now, please do me a favor, and if your password is either of these, change it: password, 123456, 12345678, 12345, dragon, or qwerty.
