House Democrats request hearing on recent DDoS attack

Democratic members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce recently urged Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Tim Murphy (R-PA) to call for a hearing on the recent cyber attack that caused outages on many popular U.S. websites.

The request was sent in a letter by U.S. Reps. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Diane DeGette (D-CO), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Jerry McNerney (D-CA).

“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,” the House members said in the letter. “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.”

The request comes in the wake of an Oct. 21 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack directed at the server infrastructure of Dynamic Network Services Inc., which provides domain name services to many popular U.S.-based websites. The DDoS attack utilized malware to organize a network of internet-of-things devices to overwhelm the company’s servers, which left the websites inaccessible for hours after the attack occurred.

Upton and Murphy have yet to issue a formal response to the letter.