The Friday cyberattack on an Internet company that disrupted major websites including Twitter, PayPal, and Amazon was probably carried out by low-level hackers referred to as “script kiddies,” according to new research by cybersecurity firm Flashpoint.
“Flashpoint discovered that the infrastructure used in the attack also targeted a well-known video game company,” the company noted. “While there does not appear to have been any disruption of service, the targeting of a video game company is less indicative of hacktivists, state-actors, or social justice communities, and aligns more with the hackers that frequent online hacking forums.”
“These hackers exist in their own tier, sometimes called ‘script kiddies,’ and are separate and distinct from hacktivists, organized crime, state-actors, and terrorist groups. They can be motivated by financial gain, but just as often will execute attacks such as these to show off, or to cause disruption and chaos for sport,” researchers explained in their report, published mid-Tuesday.
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Observers had suspected several culprits, most of whom would be politically motivated. New World Hackers, an affiliate of the hacking collective Anonymous, took credit in a message on Twitter shortly after the attack, while WikiLeaks intimated itself by calling on its supporters to “stop taking down the U.S. Internet.”
“Flashpoint discounts many of the claimed political motivations for this attack,” researchers wrote. “Dyn DNS is a central target whose outage would affect a wide variety of website and online services, and does not disproportionately affect any one political entity. Such a broad scope of targeting does not lend itself to a politically motivated attack.”
“Additionally, the indicators that we do have point to specific communities that have historically been apolitical,” they added. “The technical and social indicators of this attack align more closely with attacks from the Hackforums community than the other type of actors that may be involved, such as higher-tier criminal actors, hacktivists, nation-states, and terrorist groups. These other types of threat actors are unlikely to launch such an attack without a clear financial, political, or strategic objective, and they are very unlikely to launch an attack against a video game company.”
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a similar conclusion in remarks in New York on Tuesday. “But I wouldn’t want to be conclusively definitive about that yet,” Clapper said.
