Several of the world's best-known websites were inaccessible across parts of the United States on Friday after hackers unleashed a series of attacks on a company that acts as a switchboard for the internet.
The attacks affected access to Twitter, Paypal, Spotify,Amazon and other customers of the infrastructure company in New Hampshire called Dyn,which processes large volumes of internet traffic.
"The attacks came in waves," Al Jazeera's Rob Reynolds, reporting from Los Angeles, said.
"First targeting the East Coast of the United States, spreading then to the other parts of the country and even to Western Europe."
"The websites that were disrupted were some of the top names in the internet:
CNN and the New York Times, AirBnB, Reddit, HBO ... a whole variety of sites were attacked."
"Dyn is kind of a middle man that directs users to different websites and routes traffic from server to server in a complex way," said Reynolds.
The attackers used hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices that had previously been infected with a malicious code that allowed them to cause outages.
"This type of attack is known as a distributed denial of service attack [DDoS]," explained our correspondent. "They used affected computers to fire requests at the servers of Dyn simultaneously and essentially overwhelm it."
"The complexity of the attacks is what's making it very challenging for us," Dyn's chief strategy officer, Kyle York, told Reuters news agency.
Kyle York said that at least some of the malicious traffic was coming from connected devices,
including webcams and digital video recorders, that had been infected with control software named Mirai.
Security researchers have previously raised concerns that such connected devices, sometimes referred to as the Internet of Things, lack proper security.
The Mirai code was dumped on the internet about a month ago, and criminal groups are now charging to employ it in cyber attacks,
said Allison Nixon, director of security research at Flashpoint, which was helping Dyn analyse the attack.
The Department of Homeland Security last week issued a warning about attacks from the Internet of Things, following the release of the code for Mirai.
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