From InfoWorld: It's apparently possible that a DDoS attack can be big enough to break the internet -- or, as shown in the attack against ISP Dyn, at least break large parts of it.
The DDoS attack against Dyn that began Friday went far past taking down Dyn's servers. Beyond the big-name outages, organizations could not access important corporate applications or perform critical business operations.
As one of the largest ISPs in the world, Dyn going offline took down a significant chunk of the DNS, the internet's address directory. DNS lets users connect to websites and online services around the world using easy-to-remember addresses instead of the server's numeric IP designation. Thus, when the servers are unavailable, internet users cannot access any of those belonging to organizations that are Dyn customers.
"Imagine all the street signs of your city suddenly goes blank. No one knows where to go," said Marc Gaffan, general manager of Imperva Incapsula.
With DDoS attacks, the tendency is to focus on organizations directly affected. Thus, when hacktivists target financial services or gaming sites, the victims are those trying to access those applications. The information is intact, albeit temporarily unavailable.
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