On the morning of Oct. 21, you may have been sitting in your farm office surfing the web for news and information and noticed that some of your favorite websites were inaccessible. The outages disrupted hundreds of websites, including Amazon and Twitter. Even news websites like CNN and The New York Times experienced outages.

What exactly occurred is somewhat complicated, but in short, it is believed that an individual or a group of people in part utilized “internet of things” devices to direct large amounts of web traffic via tens of millions of IP addresses to cause outages of a DNS provider, Dyn. This type of cyberattack is known as a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack occurred in three waves over the course of the day. Here are some explanations and definitions to help you to better understand this event:

1. What is a DDoS attack? A distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS attack, is a type of cyberattack that aims to overwhelm an online service with traffic from multiple sources to make it unavailable. Most often these attacks are directed at specific websites like bank or media websites. Attacking a DNS provider is an unusual event – affecting many sites rather than just one.

2. Who’s behind the Oct. 21 attack? At the time of this article, no one knows and no one has claimed responsibility. The event is under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

3. What is a DNS provider? A DNS (Domain Name System) provider manages domain name registration servers. Some DNS providers may also provide hosting services. A DNS server includes a directory IP addresses associated with websites like farmfutures.com and routes the user attempting to find that site. Attacking a DNS is the equivalent of scrambling the contacts in your phone – you don’t have the numbers to reach the person when you need to.

4. What’s an IP address?  An IP address is a number separated by dotted decimals that is assigned to every device on the internet as well as the location of a website (e.g. 127.0.0.1).

5. What is the Internet of Things (IoT)? The Internet of Things is a term used to describe everyday objects connected to the internet – a growing trend in farm offices. In this recent attack, tens of millions of malware-infected devices including IP cameras, wireless routers and DVRs directed traffic to Dyn’s servers.

In the coming weeks and months, more information will become available about one of the largest cyberattacks in history. Want to know more? You can read Dyn’s statement about the attack here.

Were you or was your website affected by the Oct. 21 outages? Tell me about it in the comments below, on Twitter @nerdsquawk or via email at [email protected].

The opinions of the author are not necessarily those of Farm Futures or Penton Agriculture.