Non-State Actors May Have Caused Massive Cyberattack

The investigations into last week’s massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack — which took down major sites, like Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter and GitHub — have shown that the likely culprit behind the attack was a non-state actor.

This particular type of hacker is usually not affiliated with any specific state or government. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said the enormous attack on internet domain directory Dyn may not have been perpetrated by a government group.

Using the data gathered so far, preliminary indications have ruled out many of the usual suspects for this level of cyberattack, such as online blackmailers and national governments.

“All the arrows point away from any sort of political motivation,” which hurts “the nation-state argument,” Allison Nixon, a security researcher at Flashpoint, told The Wall Street Journal. “Of course, you never know until someone’s got handcuffs on them.”

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that law enforcement agencies are still working to uncover the source of last Friday’s (Oct. 21) attacks.

This historic cyberattack caused a ripple of disruption to websites across all sorts of industries and was fueled by a botnet known as Mirai, which utilized hacked DVRs and webcams to launch the series of attacks.

Thousands of Americans experienced the magnitude of a DDoS attack and the damages these malicious events can bring about.