A major hack attack snarled Web traffic on the East Coast Friday, all the most famous website such as Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, SoundCloud, PayPal, eBay, Amazon and even Netflix were not accessible for users for hours. The FBI and Homeland Security is current still investigating on this case and trying to find out who is responsible for the attack. (BBC News, 2016)
The company being attacked is a internet service company called Dyn. The company claimed that the incidents is due to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks which is an attempt to take websites offline by overloading them with internet traffic from different sources. For more information regarding to this certain type of cyber attack, have a look at the video:(BBC News, 2016)
Such news has reminded us again about the importance of cyber security as the Internet of things has growing faster than ever. I believe that the term cyber attack is not unfamiliar to anyone anymore these days. We have seen many news recent year that companies being hacked and that users account or information is leaked or so, such as what happened earlier this year with Linkedin and Yahoo. It is now a big concern for any active online companies to take into account in their daily operation. In my opinion, there are some things that could be done to improve the cyber security for companies. Firstly, more investment on IT service is necessary to building up the castle wall, firewall seems not enough as a protection anymore. Secondly, they should know better about the data being stored so that more specific solution could be provided to protect it or in the worst case scenario, companies would know better what information is hacked/leaked and how to makeup for it.
What do you think of this issue concerning cyber security? What could be the possible ways to improve it in your view ?
Reference:
BBC News. (2016). Cyber attacks briefly knock out top sites – BBC News. [online] Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37728015 [Accessed 22 Oct. 2016].
Thank you for your post!
The current technology transformation in almost every aspect, is in most cases very beneficial. However, it was to be expected that certain parties will use this transformation to attack the most famous websites and instances. These attacks are maybe even of the worst kind, since they can get to everyone affiliated with these instances. For now, I’m afraid this cyberwar will continue, even if firewalls are enhanced, because of the impact of an attack. Certain parties will not give up in trying to hack and attack, and since a lot of companies have a lot of trouble managing the huge amounts of data, it will, in my opinion, be very hard to for them to defend themselves.