For the past couple of hours Amazon S3 has been experiencing (as Amazon loves to put it) "high error rates" in their East Coast zone. This is having some serious effects on a lot of the web at the moment as sites, parts of sites, pictures, etc. are randomly appearing and disappearing. Some of the big hosting providers who are heavily dependent on Amazon services are also suffering at the moment.
CloudFlare has warned of another massive botnet that appears to be ramping up and targeting the US West Coast.
In a blog post, the content delivery network said it has been watching a flood of attack traffic that started two weeks ago and appears to have been coming from one person testing out its abilities before moving it to 24-hour management.
The Internet Archive, a digital library nonprofit that preserves billions of webpages for the historical record, is building a backup archive in Canada after the election of Donald Trump. Today, it began collecting donations for the Internet Archive of Canada, intended to create a copy of the archive outside the United States.
A last-ditch effort in the Senate to block or delay rule changes that would expand the U.S. government's hacking powers failed Wednesday, despite concerns the changes would jeopardize the privacy rights of innocent Americans and risk possible abuse by the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.
Once again this election season we're hearing about the need for voter ID - fixing a problem that doesn't really exist, while completely ignoring all of the ways our elections can really be compromised on a large scale. Certainly voter suppression is one of these, and is a real issue, but we're also continuing to ignore the technological weaknesses of our voting infrastructure.
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.
One of the great promises of modern life is the Internet of Things - you know, where all those little gadgets and thingy-dos in your world are connected to the internet, and we can control them and talk to them and interact from everywhere. This is a really slick bunch of stuff and a lot of it is intriguing, and remarkably cheap, all things considered.
