Over the last few years, networks have begun the shift from the five decade old IPv4 architecture to the newer IPv6 system. While the number of addresses available to IPv4 was massive at the time, the new system will provide so many addresses that it's possible to assign a unique address to every atom on the planet. But that shift has resulted in another change. Threat actors now have new ways to potentially attack systems. Wesley George, Principal Engineer at Neustar, and I discussed what this means for today's network managers.

Akamai uses data from the content distribution network to compile reports on things like broadband speeds and data usage trends. Their security report for Q1 2017 reveals that the nature of DDoS attacks has been changing recently.

Last September, a bunch of major websites were rendered 404 when the Mirai botnet surfaced. By attacking hundreds of thousands of unsecured IoT devices Mirai was able to attack DNS provider Dyn resulting in hundreds of online services dropping like flies. Persirai borrows some code from Mirai but "improves" upon it.

This morning a ton of websites and services, including Spotify and Twitter, were unreachable because of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, a major DNS provider. Details of how any the attack happened remain vague, but one thing seems certain. Our internet is frightfully fragile in the face of increasingly sophisticated hacks.