Cyber attacks are constant and a reminder of the importance of security and privacy | What's Left
The internet has become so important to global and local economies that if a connection goes down, it becomes a major disruption to peoples' lives and work. This has made it a prime focus for those who want to cause economic damage.
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Last week saw an attack on Dyn, a major part of the Domain Name Service (DNS) infrastructure of the internet. Many major “cloud” services and internet companies saw their websites become unreachable. Sites affected included big players like Twitter, Paypal, Reddit, and Github which are sites that many workers (contract and permanent alike) rely on to get contracts and get paid.
Digital privacy, security, and encryption will continue to make headlines so long as there are cyber attacks on major parts of the internet. And, there will be increasing attacks on the internet infrastructure by state agencies, criminal entities, organized hacktivist communities, and terrorist groups. Unfortunately, the major news media continue to ignore some important reasons these attacks have been possible. The pundits (and governments) also seem to ignore any of the reforms that could be implemented to improve the internet’s resistance to these attacks.
Luckily for you and your loved ones, What’s Left has written about the vulnerabilities before and suggested some positions the left should promote to address the broader problem. Even on the left, socialist organizations and unions need to adopt more resilient systems of communication (and avoid some entirely) to avoid being caught-up in these problems. All security vulnerabilities that affect international companies and cloud hosting solutions are also an issue for our organizations. The difference is that international capital and the state intelligence agencies are unlikely to come to our rescue.
• DoS attack on major DNS provider brings Internet to morning crawl | Ars
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