User:Balpreet girn

If you were trying to catch up on the latest news or check out what was trending on Twitter this morning, you might have received a message that said that your browser couldn't connect to the server. Twitter, Reddit, Spotify and even news sites such as CNN experienced a widespread outage early today due to a so-called DDoS cyberattack that affected many users on the East Coast of the United States, according to several news outlets. How does this attack work, and what does it do?

The culprit behind the outage is what's known as a distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS, which was mounted against a company called Dyn DNS. It's one of the more common types of cyberattack, though today's incident was a bit more widespread than usual, because most attacks focus on one site. One of the largest DDoS attacks ever targeted the BBC sites and its on-demand media service, reported The Hacker News.

A DDoS attack works by essentially overloading the target server with requests to connect. This is not unlike overwhelming a receptionist at a big company with phone calls, bombarding the phone lines with calls.