I just saw this heatmap on downdector.com showing the impact of the widespread distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack yesterday afternoon.
It sounds like a number of real estate sites that use Dyn servers to host their content were affected, like Zillow, Trulia, GoPaperless, various high end real estate blogs, and even our own NWMLS. Huge numbers of other business and personal sites were attacked as well. And the bad news, experts say this may become more common.
What scares me most is the penetration into the rapidly expanding, and poorly secured, IoT (Internet of Things) devices in homes, businesses, and public utilities everywhere. These devices are mostly wide open to wireless intrusion and easily exploited, according to security experts. I'm talking about security cameras, smart doorbells, home thermostats, hands-free voice command devices in our cars and homes. Virtually any actionable intelligence device connected to the cloud is vulnerable.
This attack could very possibly be just an attempt to probe our vulnerabilities so the hackers can perform more precise and damaging attacks next time. This is not the brave new world any of us want.