Remember how I said we'd be seeing more of these Internet of Things attacks?

A couple weeks back I wrote about how the Krebs on Security site had been taken down by a huge DDOS attack from Internet of Things (IOT) devices around the world.  And I said we'd be seeing more. There have been a vew of them, but today's is a doozy. Many of the biggest sites on the Internet fell over today (and are still struggling) due to a massive attack on the DNS infrastructure at a company called DYN. DYN provides DNS services for many big sites on the web, so hitting their DNS really hard has had serious effects, taking down many site on both coasts.

It's been known for some time that the Internet is fairly vulnerable to big attacks on DNS servers, but the size of these is unprecedented, and this particular attack has affected many sites at once. As an Internet services provider I'm a little on pins and needles all the time, but am particularly interested in finding new ways to protect my clients from these classes of attack.

Many of our clients (including this site) have Cloudflare as their DNS service. This is at least in theory very robust, with servers at over 100 sites all over the world. Still, with attacks of this size it's not clear that this wil be enough if someone launched a large attack against Cloudflare. Our other clients have their DNS on four different DNS servers in three different parts of the country. We're looking into the possiblity of pushing our DNS off to networks of other servers.