Around 5.40 pm yesterday Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp became inaccessible around the world. Then shortly before one in the morning (Italian time) they slowly started working again. And finally Mark Zuckerberg’s apologies for the gigantic global blackout also came. “Sorry for the interruption, we know how many people rely on our services to stay connected.” But what happened? Here is the analysis of the experts of Acronis, Service Provider of Cyber Protection solutions of international level.
“While there is no confirmation as to what caused the incident at Facebook Inc, it is possible that the problem lies in the BGP or DNS protocol – which are popular targets among cybercriminals. There are various potential attacks against the infrastructure. DNS – from DDoS attacks to local DNS rebinding or hijacking a DNS with social engineering against the registrar. Looking at the overall attack statistics, they are far less popular than common malware and ransomware attacks, but can be extremely devastating if successful. in a sophisticated attack. It’s like pulling the power cord of your server room – the whole enterprise suddenly goes dark, ”comments Candid Wuest, Acronis VP of Cyber Protection Research.
“The protection against DNS attacks is not trivial as they come in multiple facets. It requires strong authentication and patching to secure its services, training against social engineering attacks, as well as classic DDoS mitigations from vendors, such as Cloudflare. Of course, configuration problems should also be avoided. Depending on which service is being attacked – for example, if it’s a central authentication server shared across multiple brands, as in this case, then such an outage can lead to multiple brands going offline. Indeed, we must note that most of the disruptions are caused by non-malicious actions and we suspect this is also the case, ”concludes Wuest.