The internet apocalypse map hides the major vulnerability that created it
Summary
Screenshots from sites like downdetector.com showed menacingly red, fuzzy heat maps of, well, effectively just population centers of the United States experiencing serious difficulty accessing Twitter, Github, Etsy, or any of Dyns other high-profile clients. DNS is ground zero for the uneasy tension of the internet’s presumed decentralized resilience and the reality that as of now, translating IP addresses into domain names requires some kind of centralized, hierarchical platform, and that’s probably not going to radically change anytime soon. For dense coastal areas, some internet exchanges are also key switch points for data traveling across transoceanic submarine cables, as in the case of Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street or Los Angeles’ One Wilshire. If Twitter, Github, AWS, and all of Dyn’s other clients were separately, simultaneously hit with the same scale of DDoS attack on their nameservers, would they have done any better at fending it off than a single company that specializes in this stuff? October 21st, 2016 is a day that may or may not not live in cyberwar infamy, but the DDoS was unexpectedly successful in uniting the community of mostly unnoticed and often forgotten people who work on maintenance of core internet infrastructure.
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