Experts say there is no evidence the U.S. was the target of a major cyberattack.
Newsweek reported that rumors of a DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attack were sparked on Monday after social networks, banks, online games and others appeared to suffer unexplained outages. Those impacted appeared to include T-Mobile, Fortnight, AT&T, Facebook Messenger and Instagram, Newsweek noted.
A DDoS attack sends a large amount of traffic at a particular platform’s servers in an effort to temporarily knock it offline.
Rumors of the attack were tweeted by YourAnonCentral, which has 6.5 million followers. At one point, Forbes noted the DDoS hashtag had even been trending on Twitter.
But cybersecurity experts say the attack claim was not accurate.
"There's a lot of buzz right now about a ‘massive DDoS attack’ targeting the US, complete with scary-looking graphs,” tweeted Matthew Prince, founder of web security giant Cloudflare. “While it makes for a good headline in these already dramatic times, it's not accurate. The reality is far more boring."
Prince said that T-Mobile was making changes to its network configurations, but they "went badly," and caused a "series of cascading failures" for users' voice and data networks.
And cyber researcher Brian Krebs tweeted: "I have found no indication these outages are DDoS related. Rather, there may be Sprint/T-Mobile issues related to a wonky update in the systems from the Sprint side to help merge with T-Mobile."
Jeffrey Rodack ✉
Jeffrey Rodack, who has nearly a half century in news as a senior editor and city editor for national and local publications, has covered politics for Newsmax for nearly seven years.
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