Death of the Internet, Film at 11

Sat Oct 22 20:47:34 UTC 2016

Generic question:

The media seems to have concluded it was an "internet of things" that
caused this DDoS.

I have not seen any evidence of this. Has this been published by an
authoritative source or is it just assumed?

Has the type of device involved been identified?

I am curious on how some hacker in basement with his TRS80 or Commodore
Pet would be able to reach "bilions" of these devices to reprogram them.
 Vast majority of homes are behind NAT, which means that an incoming
packet has very little chance of reaching the IoT gizmo.

I amn guessing/hoping such devices have been identified and some
homweoners contacted ans asked to volunteer their device for forensic
analysis of where the attack came from ?

Is it more plausible that those devices were "hacked" in the OEM
firmware and sold with the "virus" built-in ? That would explain the
widespread attack.

Also, in cases such as this one, while the target has managed to
mitigate the attack, how long would such an attack typically continue
and require blocking ?

Since the attack seemed focused on eastern USA DNS servers, would it be
fair to assume that the attacks came mostly from the same region (aka:
devices installed in eastern USA) ? (since anycast would point them to
that).

OPr did the attack use actual IP addresses instead of the unicast ones
to specifically target servers ?

BTW, normally, if you change the "web" password on a "device", it would
also change telnet/SSH/ftp passwords.