2. Dyn Attack

Internet performance management company Dyn was hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in October that affected its Managed Domain Name Servers (DNS) customers and caused widespread internet outages across the East Coast, impacting prominent sites such as Amazon.com, Twitter and Spotify. The attack came largely from devices infected by the Mirai botnet – malware that spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords. Solution providers at the time said the DDoS attack validated and deepened the industry's concerns over the security risk posed by the Internet of Things.