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A large chunk of the internet dropped offline on Thursday. Some of the most popular sites, apps and services on the internet were down, including UPS and FedEx (which have since come back online), Airbnb, Fidelity, and others are reporting Steam, LastPass, and the PlayStation Network are all experiencing downtime.

Many other websites around the world are also affected, including media outlets in Europe.

What appears to be the cause is an outage at Akamai, an internet security giant that provides networking and content delivery services to companies. At around 11 a.m. ET, Akamai reported an issue with its Edge DNS, a service thats designed to keep websites, apps and services running smoothly and securely.

DNS services are critically important to how the internet works, but are known to have bugs and can be easily manipulated by malicious actors. Companies like Akamai have built their own DNS services that are meant to solve some of these problems for their customers. But when things go wrong or theres an outage, it can cause a knock-on effect to all of the customer websites and services that rely on it.

Akamai said it was actively investigating the issue, but when reached a spokesperson would not say if its outage was the cause of the disruption to other sites and services that are currently offline. A spokesperson for ThousandEyes, an internet monitoring company bought by Cisco in 2020, attributed the outage to Akamai.

Akamai would not say what caused the issue but that it was already in recovery.

We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations. We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated, Akamai told TechCrunch.

In a follow-up tweet, the company said it was not a result of a cyberattack.

Its not the first time weve seen an outage this big. Last year Cloudflare, which also provides networking services to companies around the world, had a similar outage following a bug that caused major sites to stop loading, including Shopify, Discord and Politico. In November, Amazons cloud service also stumbled, which prevented it from updating its own status page during the incident. Online workspace startup Notion also had a high-profile outage this year, forcing the company to turn to Twitter to ask for help.

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A DNS outage just took down a large chunk of the internet - TechCrunch

Connecticut pushes cybersecurity with offers of punitive damage protection

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamontsigned a bill designed to encourage businesses in the state to beef up their cybersecurity.

An Act Incentivizing the Adoption of Cybersecurity Standards for Businesses will protect businesses from punitive damages resulting from a breach of personal data if they have adopted and adhere to industry-standard cybersecurity measures.

The new law requires businesses to secure individuals names, Social Security numbers, taxpayer ID numbers, driver's license numbers or other government identifiers; financial account numbers and passwords; medical or health insurance information; biometric information; and names or email address that are used in combination with a password or security to access online accounts.

To be exempt from damages, an organization must conform to the current version of any recognized security framework such as the National Institute of Standards and Technologys Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity; Special Publications 800-171, 800-53 and 800-53a; the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program's FedRAMP Security Assessment Framework; the Center for Internet Security's Critical Security Controls for Effective Cyber Defense; or the ISO/IEC 27000 series.

Organizations already regulated by the state or federal government must keep their compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Federal Information Security Modernization Act and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act in order to avoid paying punitive damages.

Businesses must also comply with the current version of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

When any of the relied-upon cybersecurity standards are updated, businesses have six months to comply.

The legislation is the latest of Connecticuts efforts to better secure its assets. Earlier this year, Lamontannouncedthe centralization of state IT resources and named Jeff Brown as the states first chief information security officer.

Across the globe, cybersecurity risks continue to rise,Brown said. Connecticut is investing in cybersecurity and technology in new ways to protect our residents and businesses. We are bringing our statewide information technology team together into one, collaborative organization that will help us identify and deter cybersecurity incidents faster, bring everyone onto streamlined platforms, and ultimately protect more private information.

The measure goes into effect on Oct. 1, 2021.

About the Author

Connect with the GCN staff on Twitter @GCNtech.

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Connecticut pushes cybersecurity with offers of punitive damage protection - GCN.com

Digital security and privacy company Avast, and RiskIQ, an internet security intelligence company, have announced a threat intelligence partnership. Under the agreement, the companies will use their specific areas of expertise to develop combined threat intelligence for their customer bases to enhance security practices.

At Avast, we recognise that no one provider can see the whole picture, says Avast senior VP, partner business, Nick Viney.

Thats why we partner broadly to improve the threat intelligence available to companies and also to improve our ability to protect our customers. Our global threat intelligence will contribute to RiskIQs understanding of the worldwide threat landscape.

"Avast will leverage RiskIQs intelligence to enrich our data and further scale our threat hunting and response capabilities for companies and consumers alike," he adds.

Avasts threat intelligence platform covers hundreds of millions of endpoints from internet threats, powered by threat intelligence from Avasts global network, one of the worlds largest and most geographically diverse threat detection networks. Avast says advanced analytics enable insight into thousands of malware families, including how they are detectable before customers are impacted, and how those threats evolve as bad actors attempt to evade detection.

RiskIQ aggregates and collects data and intelligence from the whole internet to identify threats and attacker infrastructure, and leverages machine learning to scale threat hunting and incident response. Its Illuminate Internet Intelligence Platform provides content on attackers, including their tools and systems, and indicators of compromise across the global attack surface.

RiskIQ and Avast share a mission to protect people and businesses on the internet, and as partners, we can both be more effective, says RiskIQ CEO, Lou Manousos.

Avast helps us enrich our understanding of the global threat landscape, and we welcome them to our Interlock Partner Program. RiskIQs Interlock Partner Program is a next-generation program supporting deep, bi-directional integrations that meaningfully advance the capabilities and value for customers and both solutions.

It enables members to rapidly deploy RiskIQ attack surface visibility and internet security intelligence across their enterprise security ecosystem (or infrastructure) for automated and informed threat detection, investigations, and prevention, he says.

Avast has 435 million online users and offers products under Avast and AVG to protect from threats on the internet and the evolving IoT threat landscape. While RiskIQ specialises in digital attack surface management, discovery, intelligence, and mitigation of threats associated with an organisations digital presence. Based in San Francisco, the company is backed by Summit Partners, Battery Ventures, Georgian Partners, NationalGrid Partners, and MassMutual Ventures.

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Avast and RiskIQ announce threat intelligence partnership - ChannelLife Australia

A 18-year-old Tennessee man who helped set in motion a fraudulent distress call to police that led to the death of a 60-year-old grandfather in 2020 was sentenced to 60 months in prison today.

60-year-old Mark Herring died of a heart attack after police surrounded his home in response to a swatting attack.

Shane Sonderman, of Lauderdale County, Tenn. admitted to conspiring with a group of criminals thats been swatting and harassing people for months in a bid to coerce targets into giving up their valuable Twitter and Instagram usernames.

At Sondermans sentencing hearing today, prosecutors told the court the defendant and his co-conspirators would text and call targets and their families, posting their personal information online and sending them pizzas and other deliveries of food as a harassment technique.

Other victims of the group told prosecutors their tormentors further harassed them by making false reports of child abuse to social services local to the targets area, and false reports in the targets name to local suicide prevention hotlines.

Eventually, when subjects of their harassment refused to sell or give up their Twitter and Instagram usernames, Sonderman and others would swat their targets or make a false report to authorities in the targets name with the intention of sending a heavily armed police response to that persons address.

For weeks throughout March and April 2020, 60-year-old Mark Herring of Bethpage, Tenn. was inundated with text messages asking him to give up his @Tennessee Twitter handle. When he ignored the requests, Sonderman and his buddies began having food delivered to Herrings home via cash on delivery.

At one point, Sonderman posted Herrings home address in a Discord chat room used by the group, and a minor in the United Kingdom quickly followed up by directing a swatting attack on Herrings home.

Ann Billings was dating Mr. Herring and was present when the police surrounded his home. She recalled for the Tennessee court today how her friend died shortly thereafter of a heart attack.

Billings said she first learned of the swatting when a neighbor called and asked why the street was lined with police cars. When Mr. Herring stepped out on the back porch to investigate, police told him to put his hands up and to come to the street.

Unable to disengage a lock on his back fence, Herring was instructed to somehow climb over the fence with his hands up.

He was starting to get more upset, Billings recalled. He said, Im a 60-year-old fat man and I cant do that.'

Billings said Mr. Herring then offered to crawl under a gap in the fence, but when he did so and stood up, he collapsed of a heart attack. Herring died at a nearby hospital soon after.

Mary Frances Herring, who was married to Mr. Herring for 28 years, said her late husband was something of a computer whiz in his early years who securedthe @Tennessee Twitter handle shortly after Twitter came online. Internet archivist Jason Scott says Herring was the creator of the successful software products Sparkware and QWIKMail; Scott has 2 hours worth of interviews with Herring from 20 years ago here.

Perhaps the most poignant testimony today came when Ms. Herring said her husband who was killed by people who wanted to steal his account had a habit of registering new Instagram usernames as presents for friends and family members whod just had children.

If someone was having a baby, he would ask them, What are your naming the baby?, Ms. Herring said. And he would get them that Instagram name and give it to them as a gift.

Valerie Dozono also was an early adopter of Instagram, securing the two-letter username VD for her initials. When Dozono ignored multiple unsolicited offers to buy the account, she and many family and friends started getting unrequested pizza deliveries at all hours.

When Dozono continued to ignore her tormentors, Sonderman and others targeted her with a SIM-swapping attack, a scheme in which fraudsters trick or bribe employees at wireless phone companies into redirecting the targets text messages and phone calls to a device they control. From there, the attackers can reset the password for any online account that allows password resets via SMS.

But it wasnt the subsequent bomb threat that Sonderman and friends called in to her home that bothered Dozono most. It was the home invasion that was ordered at her address using strangers on social media.

Dozono said Sonderman created an account on Grindr the location-based social networking and dating app for gay, bi, trans and queer people and set up a rendezvous at her address with an unsuspecting Grindr user who was instructed to waltz into her home as if he was invited.

This gentleman was sent to my home thinking someone was there, and he was given instructions to walk into my home, Dozono said.

The court heard from multiple other victims targeted by Sonderman and friends over a two-year period. Including Shane Glass, who started getting harassed in 2019 over his @Shane Instagram handle. Glass told the court that endless pizza deliveries, as well as SIM swapping and swatting attacks left him paranoid for months that his assailant could be someone stalking him nearby.

Judge Mark Norris said Sondermans agreement to plead to one count of extortion by threat of serious injury or damage carries with it a recommended sentence of 27 to 33 months in prison. However, the judge said other actions by the defendant warranted up to 60 months (5 years) in prison.

Sonderman might have been eligible to knock a few months off his sentence had he cooperated with investigators and refrained from committing further crimes while out on bond.

But prosecutors said that shortly after his release, Sonderman went right back to doing what he was doing when he got caught. Investigators who subpoenaed his online communications found hed logged into the Instagram account FreeTheSoldiers, which was known to have been used by the group to harass people for their social media handles.

Sonderman was promptly re-arrested for violating the terms of his release, and prosecutors played for the court today a recording of a phone call Sonderman made from jail in which he brags to a female acquaintance that he wiped his mobile phone two days before investigators served another search warrant on his home.

Sonderman himself read a lengthy statement in which he apologized for his actions, blaming his addiction on several psychiatric conditions including bipolar disorder. While his recitation was initially monotone and practically devoid of emotion, Sonderman eventually broke down in tears that made the rest of his statement difficult to hear over the phone-based conference system the court made available to reporters.

The bipolar diagnoses was confirmed by his mother, who sobbed as she simultaneously begged the court for mercy while saying her son didnt deserve any.

Judge Norris said he was giving Sonderman the maximum sentenced allowed by law under the statute 60 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release, but implied that his sentence would be far harsher if the law permitted.

Although it may seem inadequate, the law is the law, Norris said. The harm it caused, the death and destruction.its almost unspeakable. This is not like cases we frequently have that involve guns and carjacking and drugs. This is a whole different level of insidious criminal behavior here.

Sondermans sentence pales in comparison to the 20-year prison time handed down in 2019 to serial swatter Tyler Barriss, a California man who admitted making a phony emergency call to police in late 2017 that led to the shooting death of an innocent Kansas resident.

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Serial Swatter Who Caused Death Gets Five Years in Prison Krebs on Security - Krebs on Security