On Friday, October 21 there was a massive cyberattack which
caused limited access to many different social media websites. This attack
primarily took part on the East coast. “The attack affected the following
websites: Twitter, Spotify, SoundCloud, Vox Media sites, Airbnb and numerous
other sites.” (Hinchliffe, 2016)
The problem started when the company Dyn announced it had
been the victim of a cyber-attack. “Dyn is a company that hosts domain name
systems for many major companies. The attack is believed to have been launched
by a botnet based off of the Mirai base code, which is used to hijack
internet-connected devices and uses them to distribute denial of services
(DDoS) attacks.” (Hinchliffe,
2016)
Overall, this problem caused quite an issue for users of
these websites. Luckily the problem was fixed the same day, so users were able
to have access by the end of the day. While at the Public Relations Student
Society of America (PRSSA) National Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana we felt
the effects of these cyberattacks.
I attended two-chapter development sessions on Friday and
while in the sessions they wanted us to tweet our questions at them using
hashtag. For the first session we were unable too, but about half way through
the second session, Twitter was back online. Twitter is an essential part of
conferences especially for public relations students and professionals.
Fortunately, Twitter was up and running later on Friday, so we were able to
utilize the social media tool for the remainder of conference.
