House Commerce Members Raise Alarm About DynDNS DDoS Attacks

House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., are separately raising concerns about the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks Friday against DynDNS. The attacks resulted in outages or latency for many websites that use the service. The attacks most strongly affected users on the East Coast, though areas in the Midwest, California and Texas also were affected (see 1610210056). The DDoS attacks “are cause for serious concern as they directly disrupt the well-being of online businesses and consumers browsing the Internet,” Upton said in a statement Friday. “We’re closely monitoring the situation and will continue exploring strategies and developing protections to mitigate the impact these types of attacks have on our networks.” McNerney, a House Communications Subcommittee member, urged Congress Saturday to “examine this issue along with ways to improve our cyber security so that we are able to better protect against malicious parties, including hostile state actors, from interfering with our networks. Doing this will be vital for the strength of our economy and our national security.”