There was a massive DDoS attack on Friday afternoon, causing outages across America — but that the hell is a DDoS attack?
If you were trying o get to your favorite website on Friday, you might have run into some trouble. A massive internet outage hit the East Coast, causing millions of users to struggle with intermittent internet access.
We later found out at this was a DDoS attack, which caused outages that effected just about every major website that has servers connected to where the attack occurred. This meant that sites such as Reddit, Spotify, Sports Illustrated and others went down without notice and remained hard to access for many users.
All of this raises a question most of us never even considered pondering in the past: what is a DDoS attack and is it an act of cyberterrorism?
What is a DDoS Attack?
First, we have to start with what it means. DDoS means ‘Distributed Denial of Service’, which is exactly what it sounds like. A DDoS attack is when someone directly influences the bandwidth of an internet provider, thus causing an outage.
It’s a hack, essentially. Someone on one end of the line floods the bandwidth and thus causes a massive outage, or at least slows things down. That’s what the East Coast experienced on Friday afternoon, in what is being called a coordinated and well planned attack.
This then raises the question of when is a cybercrime actually cyberterrorism? That’s a dangerous subject to broach but it’s a discussion that is going to be had thanks to America being a few weeks away from one of it’s most important elections ever.
Outside of the political ripple effect, the DDoS attack is something that users should be cautious about. It’s another reminder that the world has changed dramatically and things we don’t really understand — like a DDoS attack — can throw our daily routine off course quicker and more brutal than we thought.