Elaine Ou, Columnist

The Pirates Who Stole Netflix

They'll keep doing it until people have better incentives to secure the internet of things.

October 23, 2016 at 12:00 PM UTC

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

Early cyberspace.
Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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If you were at work last Friday, you might have noticed that you couldn’t get on Twitter, Spotify, or whatever it is you do to avoid work. The sites themselves were fine, but users across the country lost access due to a large-scale attack on Dyn, a company whose servers provide infrastructure and routing services for the internet’s top destinations1477175486909.

The attack began on the East Coast, then moved westward and lasted throughout the day. As of this writing, it appeared to have subsided. Here’s a map from the website Downdetector, showing the areas most affected: