DoS

We use networks everyday, whether we are posting something on Facebook or Twitter from our mobile phones, catching up on the latest news in an online magazine, or binge watching our favorite shows on Netflix or Hulu. Networks are incredibly complex, yet for those in the know, they are all at once beautiful, intuitive, and a pain to manage, monitor, and protect. Networks serve as the backbone of every business, organization, government, school, and home.

On March 14th, Facebook, and another of their platforms, Instagram, were reportedly down due to some kind of outage. According to Kate O’Flaherty, a freelance cybersecurity journalist, in an article written for Forbes, yesterday’s outage was the worst since 2008. There was speculation that Facebook had become a victim of a cyber attack, a DDoS attack, which would not be altogether surprising given the amount of flak they have received for data breaches and security issues over the last 18 months or more.