One of the largest attacks on the internet has recently taken place.. and it all stemmed from a very old hacking vulnerability known as “DIRTY COW” that affects nearly all versions of Linux; Redhat in this case.
As you may already be aware, some very vital sites (PayPal, Salesforce, Spotify, Twitter, etc..) went down this past Friday for different extents of time.
This was known as a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. What this means simply is; a Bot-Net of zombie devices to include DVRs, Security Cameras, and various other IOT devices sent roughly 640 Gbps of information to DYN.com that brought a large amount of its customers to a grinding halt.
Now you may ask “why did they do this?” and for that question, it’s a full debate within itself.
What we can take away is that this is a clear indicator to IT enterprise and Cyber Security as a whole that events like this will become more consistent and more network attacks are on the horizon.
The fact that such a large scale and costly network event stemmed from such a simple vulnerability on such simple devices with systematic ease, is and will be a wake up call to the industry as a whole that the devil is in the details.
With all of the news on these attacks, are you ensuring you keep up to date on your Linux and Cyber Security training?