The internet shutdown

Millions of people all over the world woke up on Oct. 21 to a direct threat to their lifestyles and work. When they tried to go through their social media accounts first thing in the morning, as most of us do nowadays, they could not manage to connect, as the U.S.-based company Dyn, which provides Domain Name System (DNS) services for major websites, was under a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.

In layman's terms, a massive cyber-attack occurred through generating malicious internet traffic toward Dyn in order to block or slow down its access to its servers. The servers could not handle the massive flood of data and eventually shut down.

In such attacks, it is very difficult to find out where the attacks originate from and who is behind them, as every globally internet-connected device - such as PCs, routers, printers, webcams and even baby monitors - can be hacked and used to create the necessary internet traffic to shut down the servers. The system would be incapacitated temporarily or permanently, depending on the ability of the company to recover from the attack.

The latest attacks, amid allegations directed against Russia, resulted in a massive internet outage, starting from the east coast of the U.S. and spreading to Europe. It affected several important websites, social networking platforms, and money transfer services. The attackers flooded servers with massive internet traffic from millions of internet addresses using hundreds of thousands of devices all over the world that were hacked by a malicious code beforehand. All targeted popular online services - including Twitter, PayPal, Spotify, Reddit, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times - were quickly rendered inaccessible across the U.S. and Europe.

Kyle...