Is someone really trying to find out if they can destroy the Internet?

A particular fear is that a DDoS attack could prevent people from voting online during the U.S. election on 8 November. Overseas military and citizens are allowed to vote online in several US states and everyone in Alaska can vote online. Russia has already been implicated in the hack of Democratic National Committee emails and organizing their release through WikiLeaks. There is concern that the Russians will try and discredit the election process in whatever way they can and disrupting it through a DDoS attack on the day would be one way of achieving this.

The risk of this actually effecting the vote on the day has been dismissed however as the window for voting online in some of these situations is weeks before the election rather than on the day. When Alabama trialed online electronic voting during the primaries, their site was in fact attacked, but although it slowed down the site, it didn’t prevent anyone from voting.

There is also the possibility that this attack was actually just hackers going after a particular site that happened to be using the Dyn service. The source code for the Mirai botnet was released on 1 October and since that time, other hackers have been using the code to expand the number of bots involved and create their own botnets. DDoS attacks may actually just be hackers testing out the power of their creations.

The Internet remains incredibly vulnerable to attacks on its infrastructure and right now, there are few ways of avoiding them. Because Internet of Things devices like cameras, digital video recorders, and a whole range of other equipment are being used as vehicles to launch DDoS attacks, making sure that the devices are secure would be a priority. However, manufacturers are creating these devices in a way that doesn’t allow for automated, un-monitored updates which is what is really required for security patches to be applied when they are discovered. Governments could potentially legislate that they should take all efforts to ensure their devices are secure before allowing the public to connect them to the Internet, but this would need all countries of the world to do this.

It does bring into question the ability of governments to put even more of its interface with the public online since as soon as it does, it becomes a potential target for malicious actors. Governments in particular need to become more adept at dealing with this possibility, especially after the Australian Bureau of Statistics demonstrated that it was unable to run an online census collection successfully in the face of relatively minor DDoS attacks.

David Glance is Director of UWA Centre for Software Practice, University of Western Australia. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution / No derivative).