On October 21, 2016, attackers launched three successive distributed denial-of-service attacks against Dyn, a major Domain Name System provider. Because DNS translates website names into IP addresses, the assault made widely used services—including major platforms in Europe and North America—unavailable to large numbers of users. Dyn said it received malicious requests from tens of millions of IP addresses. Security firms FlashPoint and Akamai, along with Dyn, linked the traffic to the Mirai botnet, which had compromised internet-connected cameras, printers, residential gateways, and baby monitors by brute-forcing weak credentials.
The incident exposed how insecure consumer IoT devices could be weaponized against critical internet infrastructure. Mirai’s source code had been publicly released weeks earlier, complicating attribution; claims by Anonymous, New World Hackers, SpainSquad, and others were not confirmed, and President Barack Obama said on October 25, 2016, that investigators still did not know who was responsible. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security investigated. On December 13, 2017, the Justice Department announced guilty pleas by Paras Jha, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman in cases involving Mirai and click fraud; on December 9, 2020, an unnamed minor also pleaded guilty to participating in the Dyn attack.
