Few people realize that on October 21st, of this year, there was a major DDoS attack that affected many large sites in the United States. The outage came in the form of a major denial of service attack (DDoS). This is a popular form of attacking, where cyber Monkey-Wrenchers send an overwhelming number of requests, from multiple sources at the same time, to unsuspecting sites. This instant increase in traffic to various sites across the web, has a devastating effect on the Internet infrastructure as a whole, as we saw Friday with slow downs around the world. The office of Homeland Security News Wire published this article detailing what we can learn, to prevent future attacks.

What CSPs Can Learn from the Latest DDoS Attacks

Around the world, communications service providers (CSPs) and subscribers were affected by the 21 October 2016 DDoS attack, making it virtually impossible to reach many popular Web sites for several hours. Although CSPs weren’t targeted directly, they were still affected since the outages drove additional caching DNS traffic caused by the errors from failed DNS requests. This spike in traffic slowed overall network performance, likely driving up customer support call volumes from unhappy subscribers. The attacks highlighted the easily overlooked — yet vital — role that DNS plays on the Internet. An expert offers a few key steps CSPs can take to prepare for similar attacks in the future.
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