DYN is a DNS provider internet infrastructure company. It’s the name behind widely used DynDNS. It supports DNS for twitter, visa, github, mongo, netflix and several other big tech sites.

Doug Madory a researcher at DYN, presented a talk  on DDoS attacks in Dallas at a meeting of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) 68 – his was the last talk on Oct 19, wednesday. The talk discussed the attack on Krebs on Security last month and details other such attacks.

On Friday several sites serviced by DYN were attacked in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack involved malicious DNS lookup requests from tens of millions of IP addresses including a botnet on a large number of IoT devices infected with the Mirai malware, which is designed to brute force security on any IoT device. There are cameras involved with fixed passwords that are burned into the firmware, that cannot be changed.

The implications of IoT devices that are 1) unsecure 2) impossible to secure and 3) infected by malware and 4) controlled by a botnet that is controlled by malicious intent are made clearer with this attack.

Update on DDOS mitigation:  RFC 3882,  Configuring BGP to block Denial-of-Service attacks, discusses Remote Triggered Black Hole (RTBH) method, to configure certain routers to selectively stop malicious high volume traffic which is targeting a particular IP.  The target site is made inaccessible but the rest of the network service stays active. An example configuration is at https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/10857/use-bgp-to-defend-against-a-ddos-attack-originating-from-remote-as .  The improvement is to reduce the side-effects of such a delisting, to enable faster recovery when the attack is over.