【经济学人】互联网攻击-崩溃测试 | 2016.10.29 | 总第716期

“SOMEONE is learning how to take down the internet.” This was the headline of a blog post Bruce Schneier, a noted cyber-security expert, wrote in mid-September. It looked prescient when, on October 21st, Dynamic Network Services (Dyn), a firm that is part of the internet-address system, was disrupted by what is called a “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack. (Essentially, a DDoS floods servers with requests until they can no longer cope.) For hours, hundreds of sites were hard to reach, including those of Netflix, PayPal and Twitter.

网络安全专家布鲁斯·施奈尔于九月中旬发表博客头条，“有人正准备搞垮互联网。”10月21日，动态服务提供商Dyn公司被所谓的“分布式拒绝服务”（DDoS）攻击一事件证明了该博文的预见性。（本质上是一个DDoS洪水服务器反复发送请求直到Dyn公司无法处理。）数小时内，包括网飞、贝宝和推特在内的数以百计的网站无法被访问。

The attack on Dyn was only the latest in a string of similar ones. On September 20th, for instance , the victim was Brian Krebs, an American journalist who often reports on internet criminals. The server where he hosts his blog became the target of one of the largest DDoS attacks on record (it was bombarded with data equivalent to almost half a percent of the internet’s entire capacity). Most of the other recent digital assaults , however, were more discerning—as if the attacker “were looking for the exact point of failure,” Mr Schneier wrote in his blog post.

Dyn遭受的攻击只是近期一系列类似攻击事件之一。比如一名名为布莱恩·克雷波尔的美国记者（他经常报道网络犯罪）在9月20日就成为了受害者。他管理博客的服务器成为史上最强的DDoS攻击的目标（将近整个互联网一半流量的连续轰炸）。近期大部分的数字攻击都很有针对性，正如施奈尔先生在他的博客中写道，“犹如攻击者正在准确定位故障点”。