Mississippi Democrat Seeks Information on DHS IT Sector Cybersecurity Outreach After DynDNS Attacks
House Homeland Security Committee ranking member Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., joined other members of Congress Wednesday in raising concerns about implications of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks last week against DynDNS. The attacks caused outages and latency for multiple…
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major U.S. websites, including Netflix and Twitter (see 1610210056). House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Senate Cybersecurity Caucus co-Chairman Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., are among the other lawmakers who talked about the event (see 1610240038 and 1610250035). Thompson sought information Wednesday from Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. “While DDoS attacks are not uncommon, these attacks were unprecedented not only insofar as they appear to have been executed through malware that [is] exploitingtens of thousands of Internet of Things devices but also because they were carried out against a firm that[provides]services that, by all accounts, are essential to the operation of the internet,” Thompson said in a letter to Johnson: It underscores "interdependencies among operators in the Information Technology Sector. It is critical that the Department has a dynamic picture of these relationships and foster robust relationships with those firms that are essential to the operation of the internet.” Thompson sought information from Johnson about how DHS' knowledge of IT sector interdependencies affects “its outreach and information sharing efforts and the status of its efforts to ensure that mechanisms are in place for companies providing essential services such as Managed DNS providers to access information and technical assistance from” the department.