La Salle Security Expert Warns Cyberattacks Could Escalate
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Government officials are looking into who is behind a wave of cyberattacks that hit several popular websites Friday. Among the affected: Twitter, Spotify and Reddit. So what does it all mean for your network and how can you protect yourself?
The outage is known as a "distributed denial of service" or D-DoS -- a disruption in access to a website because of an overload of internet traffic -- and this one was caused by malware, says cybersecurity expert Dean Henry with La Salle University.
"This is the biggest DDoS attack ever. We do expect to bigger and bigger attacks going forward," Henry warned. "The program for doing it has been released to the public by some hackers, so that anybody that's technical enough can use it and can use it to do a denial of service attack."
Although credit card information was likely not taken, Henry says the best thing to do to prevent malware overriding your system is to change the passwords to any devices connected to the internet.
"Malware tries to use those commonly provided passwords that come with those devices to make it easier to take them over," he explained. "If you have a device that is connected to your internet, by all means, change your device password."
He says keeping passwords unique will make it harder for any programs to infiltrate your system.