But even in the midst of the Dyn attack, some of the Mirai-infected devices were being used to attack another target—the infrastructure of a gaming company, according to Allison Nixon, the director of security research at security company Flashpoint. That idea matches up with what others who had some insight into the attack have told Ars confidentially—that it was also pointed at Sony’s PlayStation Network, which uses Dyn as a name service provider.
For now, it’s not clear that the attacks on Dyn and the PlayStation Network were connected. And with a criminal investigation underway, a Dyn spokesperson declined to confirm or deny that Sony was also a target. “We are continuing to work closely with the law enforcement community to determine the root cause of the events that occurred during the DDoS attacks last Friday,” Adam Coughlin, Dyn’s director of corporate communications, told Ars. “Since this is an ongoing investigation, we cannot speculate on these events.”
Regardless of the reasons behind it, the attack on Dyn further demonstrates the potential disruptive power of the millions of poorly protected IoT devices. These items can be easily turned into a platform for attacking anything from individual websites to core parts of the Internet’s infrastructure. And Mirai has demonstrated that it doesn’t take “zero-day” bugs to make it happen; attackers only need poorly implemented security on devices that can’t be easily fixed.
This is definitely one of the best writeups of the DDoS attacks launched againgst Dyn last week, which led to the downtime of major Internet properties. If you want to understand some of the security-related issues associated with the Internet of Things as well as challenges of attributing attacks to different attack infrastructures and intents, this is worth your time.
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