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Bits

Daily Report: Hackers Have New Tools to Bring Down Websites

Dyn DNS, a company that essentially acts as a giant internet switchboard, was bombarded with messages that overloaded its circuits.Credit...Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Some people are old enough to remember when websites went down because of incompetence, not malicious intent.

The good news is that the software that runs big websites has improved significantly over the years. There are now tools that can spread traffic loads among thousands of servers and other improvements, so we have come to expect that our favorite sites will stay up all the time.

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The bad news? Hackers also have new tools to take those sites down. Friday morning, Dyn, a New Hampshire company that hosts critical portions of the internet’s infrastructure, was hit with so much traffic that its servers were overwhelmed. The attack caused sporadic disruptions at sites like Twitter, Reddit and The New York Times.

It is too early to say who did it. But security experts are concerned about how they did it: using a vast, co-opted collection of internet-connected devices, like cameras and perhaps even baby monitors, in what is called a distributed denial-of-service attack. Experts have been warning for some time that everyday objects with internet connections, the so-called internet of things, could be used in such an attack.

It appears those warnings have largely been ignored. And it is not clear how the attacks can be prevented in the future, other than making sure that everything in your home or your car or your office that is connected to the internet has a unique password.

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