DYN servers Hacked- The world's biggest DDoS attack so far ?

The cyber-attack that had brought down a lot of America’s internet last week was caused by a new weapon called the Mirai botnet and is probably the largest of its kind in history as mentioned by the experts.

This attack was on none other than servers of Dyn, a company that  itself manages and control a huge number of domain name system (DNS) worldwide.
Hackers have reportedly used 'distributed denial-of-service' (DDOS) to cause the outages in large parts of the world including big websites. 

So, What exactly is a DDOS attack?

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is a cyber-attack where the perpetrator uses more than one, often thousands of, unique IP addresses in an attempt to overload systems with a large number of superfluous requests to the server causing it to go down and not able to serve the legitimate users of the server or the website.

Surprisingly, this time it wasn't thousands of unique IP addresses, but 10s of millions, yes! you heard it right, 10s of millions of IP addresses used to flood the DYN, inc servers causing it to go down.

As Dyn published on Wednesday, Mirai was the “primary source of malicious attack traffic”
Mirai botnet is made up of Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as web cameras, DVR players etc that may be interconnected.

Now, the next thing that comes to mind is, why does someone carry out these types of attack.
There could be a number of reasons including and not limiting to Money, Power, Revenge or just an Error- wherein an attack was launched and then the command and control channel was lost mid-way

“A lot of these cyber-attacks start out as one particular type of attack and then they morph into something new or different,” Joe Weiss, the managing partner at the cyber-security firm Applied Control Solutions and the author of Protecting Industrial Control Systems was quoted as saying.


Weiss continued “I can’t speak for anyone else, [But] I don’t know that we really understand what the endgame is.”