Understanding the Recent Cyber Attacks

Yesterday we published an article that appeared in “USA Today” on Saturday, October 22, 2016. It seems that some of you thought your personal computers were attacked and/or personal information was stolen from sites you interact with. This is not true. We just wanted to clear things up for you.

The recent attacks using devices on the IoT (Internet of Things) was not an attempt t steal passwords, identities, or money.

Everything on the internet/web is stored on a server. For instance: We pay a server to store Cloudeight information so you can see our webpages. Every other website on the Internet does the same.

The recent attacks on some of the biggest sites on the Internet were DDoS attacks (commonly known as Denial of Service attacks). DDoS attacks are not attacks from a hacker to your computer to obtain passwords or personal information. They are attacks by bad guy who flood servers with so many fake requests for information that they cause a server to crash.

If a Web site’s server crashes, you won’t be able to see their website; it will be down. In the case of the cyberattack this week, the servers that were attacked hosted some of the biggest name companies such as Twitter, CNBC, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Paypal, Tumblr and many others.

Any information you exchanged with any of these sites was not compromised. The attacks that took place on Friday were DDoS-type attacks. The servers were so overwhelmed by the flood of information being fed to them by hackers, that sites crashed and appeared offline.

None of your personal information was stolen from any of the sites that went down on Friday. Your personal computer was not attacked.

We just wanted to clear this up as we saw that some people were misunderstanding the type of attacks that happened last Friday.