United States

Who Shut Down Much of the US Internet Friday?

It is too early to determine who was responsible for the digital attacks that darkened much of the internet in the United States Friday, cyber experts and intelligence officials told NBC News.

Some said evidence points to Russia, others proposed it was "internet vandalism." One clue could be a similar attack mounted against the Republic of Georgia eight years ago by Russian cybercriminals enlisted by a Russian intelligence agency.

Twitter, Amazon, PayPal, Spotify and Reddit are some of the sites that were knocked out in the three "denial of service," or DDoS, attacks at about 7 a.m., noon and 4 p.m. Eastern Time.

The attacks came largely via "smart" household appliances linked to the web, hit websites with more than 150,000 requests for information per second and were largely aimed at one company's internet infrastructure rather than specific websites.

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