It’s not just Retail Forex brokers which face DDoS attacks. Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, and many other huge websites were reported as down or screwed up this morning.
This was happening as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. It’s probably safe to assume that the two situations are related.
Domain Name Servers (DNS) act as the internet’s phone book. Basically, they facilitate person’s request to go to a certain webpage and make sure he/she is taken to the right place. If the DNS provider that handles requests for Spotify is down, well.. good luck getting to Spotify. Some websites are coming back for some users, but it doesn’t look like the problem is fully resolved as of this writing.
Dyn posted this update on its website:
Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.
Here’s a list of some of the websites that were inaccessible for some time:
- Spotify
- Esty
- Box