House Commerce Democrats Urge Hearing on DynDNS DDoS Attacks

House Commerce Committee ranking member Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and other committee Democrats want a House Commerce hearing on the recent distributed denial-of-service attacks against DynDNS. The late October DDoS attacks caused outages and latency for multiple major U.S. websites (see 1610210056). Industry lobbyists predicted the attacks would prompt a wider examination of the cybersecurity of IoT-connected devices (see 1610260067). “The expansion of technology and increasing connectivity of devices make it imperative that we understand what happened in this recent cyberattack and assess what can be learned from it,” said Pallone and other committee Democrats in a Monday letter to House Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and House Commerce Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Tim Murphy, R-Pa. “This could have wide-sweeping effects not only on telecommunications and Internet regulation, but also on many other areas under the Committee's jurisdiction. We urge you to hold hearings as soon as possible.” Upton raised concerns last week about the Dyn attacks, saying he was “closely monitoring the situation” (see 1610240038). The other signers of Pallone's letter were House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., House Commerce Oversight ranking member Diana DeGette, D-Colo., House Commerce Trade Subcommittee ranking member Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif.