How hackers took down Twitter, Netflix, and Reddit with baby monitors!

10 May 2026 · 1 min

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1:14

In this video, Dan Novaes explains the October 21, 2016 Dyn DDoS attack, the largest internet outage of its time. He describes how Dyn, a DNS provider that translates domain names to IP addresses, was overwhelmed by a flood of traffic generated not by traditional hackers but by millions of everyday IoT devices—cameras, routers, baby monitors—infected with the Mirai malware. Weak or absent passwords allowed attackers to conscript these devices into a massive botnet, which simultaneously bombarded Dyn’s DNS servers with requests, causing major sites such as Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, GitHub, and news outlets to become unreachable. Novaes emphasizes that the incident revealed a new attack surface: the Internet of Things, and underscores the ongoing need for stronger security standards for connected devices.

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In 2016, a single cyberattack made huge parts of the internet disappear. Not slowly, instantly. This was the Dyn attack. Dyn was a company most people had never heard of, but it controlled something critical: DNS, the system that translates website names into IP addresses. Without it, websites can't be found. On October 21st, 2016, Dyn was hit by a massive attack. Millions of requests flooded its servers, too many to handle. But here's the twist. The attack didn't come from hackers typing on keyboards. It came from everyday devices—cameras, routers, baby monitors—all infected by malware called Mirai. These devices had weak passwords. Some had no passwords at all. Hackers turned them into a botnet, a hidden army, then unleashed them all at once. The traffic overwhelmed Dyn's infrastructure, and major websites started going down—Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, GitHub, even news sites. Users thought the internet was broken. Because, in a way, it was. The attack showed something new. The internet wasn't just vulnerable through computers, but through everything connected to it. Since then, security standards have improved. But the lesson remains. Sometimes, the biggest threats don't come from powerful machines. They come from millions of tiny ones, working together.