Recently, Twitter and two other service providers hosted by owner company Dyn were under cyber-attack as their systems were engaged in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. This is an attack where hackers insert malware within a system that sends extremely many requests to the server resulting in the consumption of disk space, bandwidth and processing power. The result is that the excessive requests cause delays to actual users as the botnet tries to respond to all the fake requests. The fact that it is called distributed means that the activity can affect large computer networks as opposed to a singular computer. The result was that users of the company’s services, including Twitter, Reddit and Netflix lacked access to their systems (Nordrum, 2016).
Notably, the ability for hacks to reduce accessibility of systems among internet users has been a problem plaguing the industry for the larger part of the last two decades. In some cases, DDoS attacks have crashed entire systems taking them offline altogether. Therefore, IT companies have been at the risk of malicious attacks in their systems even through their users because the majority of malware is posted on websites as click-on ads. Tis attack on the content provider service Dyn opens up many more companies to risk as their services are interrupted. Service providers make use of common networks that corporates use for the distribution of their services. Therefore, attacking these providers could have more casualties than attacking individual corporate services.
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Once again, the issue of cyber security comes into consideration as it is necessary to ensure that the area of cyber security provides adequate comfort to users. The relative and evolving nature of information technology requires that IT companies keep up to date with the latest security measures to avoid similar circumstances. Additionally, mentoring talent from the universities to take part in IT security development is necessary to breed ethical IT workers.
References
Nordrum, A. (2016). What Is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack and How Did It Break Twitter? Retrieved from IEEE Spectrum : http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/security/what-is-a-distributed-denialofservice-attack-and-how-did-it-break-twitter .
