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Hacktivist crew claims it launched last week's DDoS mega-attack

Dyn-Dyn-Dyn... it's a knockout!

A group called New World Hackers has claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack that rendered significant portions of the web unreachable last Friday.

A series of assaults carefully targeted at Dyn, the managed DNS provider, knocked the service offline for much of the day, causing disruption to multiple sites that rely on its services including GitHub, Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, AirBnb and more. Much of the attack traffic came from Internet of Things devices compromised by the Mirai botnet malware.

Source code for the malware leaked online last month, allowing relatively unskilled cybercriminals to use devices such as PVRs, routers and IP cameras to launch denial of service attacks.

New World Hackers, a previously known group, claimed credit for the assault, which they said was a "capability test". The same group briefly knocked the BBC offline last year.

CBS reports that the "New World Hackers" group claims to be a hacktivist collective with members in Russia, China and India.

The claims by the group are yet to be either substantiated or independently verified. Some security watchers previously speculated that the Russian state had sufficient capability and motivation to launch the assault. ®

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