No Apparent Financial or Political Motivation Behind Dyn DDoS Attacks, Says Intelligence Firm

Home / News

No Apparent Financial or Political Motivation Behind Dyn DDoS Attacks, Says Intelligence Firm

By CircleID Reporter
October 26, 2016, 9:16 pm PDT Views: 6,857 Add Comment

In an after-action analysis of the Mirai botnet attacks on Dyn, business intelligence firm, Flashpoint has assessed with “a moderate degree of confidence” that the perpetrators behind the attack were most likely not politically motivated, and most likely not nation-state actors.

— No publicly available indicators of extortion: “Typically, financially motivated DDoS attacks will target business competitors, online gambling sites, or Bitcoin exchanges. Attackers can also use DDoS attacks or threats to extort money from businesses that would be affected by an outage. Despite various groups claiming responsibility for the attack, there have been no publicly available indicators of extortion—attempted or not—against Dyn DNS or any of the sites affected by the attack.”

— Discounting political motivations: “Dyn DNS is a central target whose outage would affect a wide variety of website and online services, and does not disproportionately affect any one political entity. Such a broad scope of targeting does not lend itself to a politically motivated attack. Additionally, the indicators that we do have point to specific communities that have historically been apolitical.”

NORDVPN DISCOUNT - CircleID x NordVPN
Get NordVPN [74% +3 extra months, from $2.99/month]

By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
Visit Page

Filed Under

Comments

The Weekly Wrap

More and more professionals are choosing to publish critical posts on CircleID from all corners of the Internet industry. If you find it hard to keep up daily, consider subscribing to our weekly digest. We will provide you a convenient summary report once a week sent directly to your inbox. It's a quick and easy read.