October 21, 2016, was a rough day on the internet. Dyn, a company that provides domain-name services, was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). Perhaps you tried to visit sites like Twitter or Reddit and found that they didn’t work—that’s because of the attack on Dyn. The siege utilized a botnet, an exploit in which devices are co-opted to work towards a sinister goal, like flooding a specific website with traffic. In this case, the botnet was called Mirai.
A botnet requires a multitude of devices, and there are plenty of those connected to the internet already.
