A big cyberattack on Friday impacted Internet service on the East Coast of the United States and kept several high-profile websites offline. Cyber security attacks later in the day were more global in nature. But Oct. 21, 2016, will also be remembered as the day our physical security industry’s legacy of apathy toward cybersecurity came back to haunt us.
Denial of service attack
The cyberattack last week was carried out by a botnet, a network of bots, which are software applications (in this case, computer viruses) that communicate with each other and run tasks automatically over the Internet. Bots can infiltrate unprotected computers and then use the computing power of their “hosts” to carry out various kinds of cyber-attacks on other Internet targets. In the case...
