As soon as the Oct. 4 Facebook mega outage took place, questions about the cause ran rampant. Was it a cyber crime or a technical glitch?? Who was at fault?
The outage reportedly resulted in the loss of some $60 to $100 million dollars of revenue, and Facebook’s stock plunged 4.9% on the same day. That’s a total of $47.3 billion in lost market cap.
So what’s the difference between a cyber attack and a technical problem? The Facebook outage and other cyber attack examples help us find out.
Looks Like a Cyber Crime
Commenting about the outage, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook VP of Infrastructure said, “The end result was that our DNS servers became unreachable even though they were still operational. This made it impossible for the rest of the internet to find our servers.”
This case wasn’t a cyber crime. During routine maintenance, a command was issued to assess the availability of Facebook’s global backbone network capacity. An error took down the entire network, which disconnected all Facebook global data centers. In addition, a bug in an audit tool prevented anyone from detecting and deterring the command.
The end result was a total break of Facebook server connections between its data centers and the internet.
Real Cyber Crime
On the surface, a DNS flood (a type of distributed ..
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