Oracle buys cyber attack target Dyn

Oracle plans to enhance its offerings with Dyn's expertise in monitoring, controlling, and optimizing cloud-based internet applications and managing online traffic (AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan)

Oracle plans to enhance its offerings with Dyn’s expertise in monitoring, controlling, and optimizing

 cloud-based internet applications and managing online traffic (AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan)

Oracle on Monday announced it is buying Dyn, a Web traffic management firm recently hit with a cyber attack that closed off the internet to millions of users.

Business software and hardware titan Oracle did not disclose financial terms of the deal to acquire US-based Dynamic Network Services Inc, or Dyn.

Oracle planned to enhance its own offerings with Dyn’s expertise in monitoring, controlling, and optimizing cloud-based internet applications and managing online traffic.

“Dyn’s immensely scalable and global DNS is a critical core component and a natural extension to our cloud computing platform,” Oracle product development president Thomas Kurian said in a release.

Dyn was the target of cyber attacks that pounded the underpinnings of the internet in October, crippling Twitter, Netflix and other major websites with the help of once-dumb devices made smart with online connections.

The onslaught incapacitated a crucial piece of internet infrastructure, taking aim at a service entrusted to guide online traffic to the right places by turning website names people know into addresses computers understand.

The hacker was probably a disgruntled gamer, an expert whose company closely monitored the attack said last week.

Dale Drew, chief security officer for Level 3 Communications, which mapped out how the October 21 attack took place, told a Congressional panel that the person had rented time on a botnet — a network of web-connected machines that can be manipulated with malware — to level the attack.

Using a powerful malicious program known as Mirai, the attacker harnessed some 150,000 “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices such as cameras, lightbulbs and appliances to overwhelm Dyn systems, according to Drew.

Dyn has more than 3,500 customers including Netflix, Twitter, and CNBC, making tens of billions of online traffic optimizing decisions daily, according to Oracle.