Massive DNS attack
Obama even addressed it for the brief few seconds I watched his address, he just have the generic "The Investigation is ongoing. The affected sites are Twitter, Paypal, Spotify, Netflix, and the Playstation network. How was your early morning messed up by these attacks?
http://fusion.net/story/360952/which-sites-affected-ddos-attack/
Thankfully I don't use twitter, but I actually did notice something odd about my Netflix today, I just chalked it up to issues within netflix.
It was nothing major actually, it worked fine..it's just that normally if you are playing a program and you pause it and then you fast forward..there will be a window where as you fast forward the scenes will change. So for example, I usually fast forward through the theme songs and stuff of tv shows, and I use this as a guide to know when to stop fast forwarding and judge when the opening theme is over. But today I wasn't able to do that.
Like I said, not a big deal really.
It's getting rather alarming that attacks like this are becoming easier and easier to leverage. Soon enough we're going to have anyone with a decent bit of money being able to rent out a service capable of this. It's the ****ing open DNS resolvers that need to be patched up. This is DNS reflection attack against DynDNS (ironically).
Another big problem with the rise in DDOS attacks and their bandwidth is that it pushes the internet towards centralization. I run some servers and I need to use Cloudflare / Akamai on them because we're simply not capable of fending off the malicious traffic. However, the growing push towards these big companies will mean that they will have a bigger and bigger grasp over the internet globally. Scary stuff.
Apparently, the attack was carried out by "Wikileaks supporters".
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/789574436219449345/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw