The entire internet infrastructure of the African nation of Liberia has been brought to a grinding halt after it was targeted by hackers using the same weapon that caused the largest cyber-attack in history just two weeks ago.
The attack was a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, in which a network of infected computers – a botnet – is directed to bombard its target with traffic, overloading its servers.
The weapon used in the October attack, the Mirai botnet, was particularly effective because it harnessed infected, internet-connected devices such as DVR players and digital cameras.
See my October 21 post: If Today’s Internet Outage/Hacking Was a Dry Run for Election Day, Things Could Get Very Bad