Services of Amazon, Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify restored to normal after East Coast falls victim to cyber attack

After websites like Amazon, Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Shopify  and sites and services across the East Coast were shut down on Friday due to a sweeping outage of DNS provider Dyn, the services have been restored.

According to a report, the services shut down was induced by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack.

However, the Internet traffic company has now posted a preliminary findings report on its website saying: Dyn's engineers were able to mitigate each attack and restore service shortly after the incident.

Also Read: Major cyber attack causes havoc on Internet: Twitter, Spotify among big websites to suffer outages due to DDOS attack

Dyn told on Friday afternoon the attacks are "well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions of IP addresses at the same time."
A senior U.S. intelligence official told a English leading news channel that the current assessment is that this is a classic case of internet vandalism.

The official said it does not appear at this point to be any kind of state-sponsored or directed attack. Impossible to say how long it will take to say who's responsible, the official added.

Dyn told that one of the sources of the attack is coming from devices known as the "Internet of Things" devices such as DVRs, Printers, and appliances connected to the internet.

The company said in a conference call Friday afternoon that the attack is being waged with a malware code that was released on the web in recent weeks.

Dyn said it has not heard from attackers and does not know who they are."What they're actually doing is moving around the world with each attack," Dyn Chief Strategy Officer Kyle York said in a conference call Friday afternoon.

The company's general counsel, Dave Allen, said during the call the company regularly prepares for scenarios like this.

Dyn also said the attack impacted its DNS advanced services monitoring for customers, but it later resolved the issue.But who was behind the distributed denial of service attack is still not known.

The Department of Homeland Security told that it is "looking into all potential causes" of the attack. 

What is DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a tool used to resolve human-readable web addresses against IP addresses.

What is DDOS attack

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack occurs when multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually one or more web servers. Such an attack is often the result of multiple compromised systems flooding the targeted system with traffic.
A denial of service (DoS) attack is a malicious attempt to make a server or a network resource unavailable to users, usually by temporarily interrupting or suspending the services of a host connected to the Internet.