On Friday, October 10th, 2016, cyber attacks on an extremely large scale targeted a deep level Internet infrastructure providing company called Dyn. The attacks resulted in many internet traffic problems, especially on the East Coast, and resulted in a large number of prominent sites and services being down entirely. Visa, PayPal, Reddit, and Amazon were among the many large internet presences that faced outages.
The attacks were implemented by taking advantage of security vulnerabilities in so-called “Internet of Things (IoT)” devices. These include modern household appliances that have internet connectivity. After taking control of these types of devices on a large scale, the as of yet unknown masterminds of the attack were able to attack Dyn with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This flood of traffic is designed to overwhelm the target with an impossible amount of traffic and information requests. With Dyn crippled, it was unable to serve the routing and translation needs it generally provides to internet providers and data centers (AKA Server Farms).
Even offline communities and individuals were affected when retail establishments were unable to process credit cards and perform other tasks that rely on internet provided communication.