Wikipedia knocked offline by DDoS attack

Wikipedia was hit late last week with a sustained DDoS attack knocking it offline in many parts of the world.

Wikipedia’s parent organization Wikimedia posted a statement on Sept. 7 saying it was under attack and working to return to normal operations, but posted on Twitter on Sept. 6 that it was suffering intermittent outages. The affected nations were UK, France, Germany and Italy. Parts of the United States were also impacted.

The group Netblocks reported Wikipedia was down for about nine hours starting at 1:30am UTC. Netblocks defines itself as “a civil society group working at the intersection of digital rights, cyber-security and internet governance. Independent and non-partisan, NetBlocks strives for an open and inclusive digital future for all.”

“Data indicate that the attack was initially staged in two phases, with the first briefly causing high latencies in the Americas from 6:00 p.m. UTC, and the second resulting in more severe outages across Western, Central and Eastern Europe, with disruptions also affecting the Middle East and South Asia,” the site reported.

Matt Keil, director of product marketing at Cequence Security, said the attack was conducted through residential IP addresses, or IoT devices.

“The first and most obvious goal is to amplify the attack by distributing the traffic across a wide range of IP addresses. The second goal is to give the appearance that the attack traffic is legitimate by routing it through seemingly legitimate IP addresses (IoT devices),” he told SC Media.