Attackers controlling a vast collection of internet devices unleashed several massive attacks on Friday that left dozens of popular websites, including Twitter Inc. and Netflix Inc., unreachable for parts of the day.

Web-technology provider Dynamic Network Services Inc., known as Dyn, said its domain-name-system services were subject to a massive denial-of-service attack starting at 7:10 a.m. EDT on Friday. After the first onslaught was resolved, Dyn reported another wave of attacks that caused disruptions through the day.

...</s>The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are investigating multiple cyber attacks that caused widespread online disruption on both sides of the Atlantic on Friday.

Access to dozens of websites was disrupted and prevented many users from accessing Amazon, Netflix, PayPal, Reddit, Spotify and Twitter.

The cause was a large-scale distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) against Internet performance company Dyn that blocked user access to many popular sites.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the outages that started in the Eastern United States spreading to other parts of the country and Western Europe.

Internet traffic company Dyn on Friday warned a third cyberattack is currently ongoing, hours after websites and services across the East Coast were initially shut down.

Dyn told CNBC Friday afternoon the attacks are “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions of IP addresses at the same time.”

Dyn told CNBC that one of the sources of the attack is coming from devices known as the “Internet of Things” devices such as DVRs, Printers, and appliances connected to the internet.

The company said in a conference call Friday afternoon that the attack is being waged from devices infected with a malware code that was released on the web in recent weeks.

Dyn said it has not heard from attackers and does not know who they are.

“What they’re actually doing is moving around the world with each attack,” Dyn Chief Strategy Officer Kyle York said in a conference call Friday afternoon.

The company’s general counsel, Dave Allen, said during the call the company regularly prepares for scenarios like this.

“We have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed (Domain Name System) infrastructure. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue,” Dyn said on its website at 11:52 a.m. ET.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is when a web service is intentionally overwhelmed by traffic from many sources. It is a common method for digital assaults.

Dyn also said the attack impacted its DNS advanced services monitoring for customers, but it later resolved the issue.

It was not known who was behind the distributed denial of service attack.

The Department of Homeland Security told CNBC that it is “looking into all potential causes” of the attack. NBC News reported that one U.S. intelligence official said North Korea had been ruled out as a suspect.

The White House said U.S. authorities are monitoring reports of attack on the internet services company and whether it is a “criminal act,” according to Reuters.</s>This file photo taken on November 7, 2013 shows a banner with the logo of Twitter on the front of the New York Stock Exchange in New York. Major Internet services including Twitter and Spotify suffered outages on Friday as a US Internet provider said it had come under attack (AFP photo)

SAN FRANCISCO — Cyber attacks pounded the underpinnings of the Internet on Friday, crippling Twitter, Netflix and other major websites with the help of once-dumb devices made smart with online connections.

Waves of attacks incapacitated a crucial piece of Internet infrastructure, hampering or outright blocking access to popular online venues.

“When I see something like this, I have to think state actor,” said Carbon Black national security strategist Eric O’Neill, a former “spy hunter” on the FBI counter-intelligence force.

“This is not some hacker sitting in his basement typing away on a keyboard.”

The attack was said to put a troubling new spin on an old hacker attack known as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), where millions of devices in the fast-growing Internet of things took part in the cyber onslaught.

Armies of computers infected with malicious code are typically used in DDoS attacks intended to overwhelm targets with simultaneous online requests.

Hacker software referred to as Mirai that takes control of IoT devices was evidently linked to the attack, with the broad range of devices making requests helping get past Dyn defences.

“We are seeing attacks coming from a number of different locations,” Level 3 Communications Internet services company Chief Security Officer Dale Drew said in a video posted online.

“We are seeing attacks coming from an Internet-of-things botnet that we identified called Mirai also involved in this attack.”

Heavyweight cyber attacks that seem to yield trouble but no apparent payoff could be probing defences to refine tactics for use on high value targets such as utilities or transportation systems, according to O’Neill and other computer defence specialists.

The attack could also have been meant as a message from a foreign power, cyber security analysts told AFP.

The onslaught commanded the attention of top US security agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“DHS and the FBI are aware and are investigating all potential causes” of the outages, a spokeswoman said.

The outages left Internet users unable to post messages, shop, watch videos and play games online for parts of the day.

Dynamic Network Services Inc., which manages Internet traffic, said around 1100 GMT that its infrastructure had been hit by a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack in the eastern part of the United States.

The initial attack was resolved within about two hours but the company, known as Dyn, was slammed with a second DDoS wave.

DDoS attacks involve flooding websites with more traffic than they can handle, making them difficult to access or taking them offline entirely.

Domain name servers are a crucial element of Internet infrastructure, converting numbered Internet Protocol addresses into the domain names that allow users to connect to Internet sites.

The DDoS attack hit what is akin to a directory assistance service used to route online traffic to the right addresses, meaning that even though networks such as Level 3 were running normally they couldn’t be reached.

A map published by the website downdetector.com showed the effect was felt across the US and into Europe

“The critical point is how fragile our Internet is that these attacks can happen,” O’Neill said.

He worried what damage such attacks might do in less computer security savvy sectors such as finance, energy or transportation.

Dyn put out a status update at 2217 GMT saying the incident had been resolved.

Amazon Web Services, which hosts some of the most popular sites on the Internet, including Netflix and the homestay network Airbnb, said that it also staved off one attack, only to be hit with similar problems several hours later.

DDoS attacks have been in the hacker arsenal for quite some time, but abated as companies learned how to defend against them. Security analysts say there has been a resurgence.

According to Verisign, the number of DDoS attacks rose 75 per cent year-on-year in the second quarter of this year.

Such attacks have escalated “thanks largely to the broad availability of tools for compromising and leveraging the collective firepower of so-called Internet of Things devices — poorly secured Internet-based security cameras, digital video recorders and Internet routers,” cyber security specialist Brian Krebs wrote in a post at krebsonsecurity.com.

Attackers use DDoS attacks for a range of purposes, including censorship, protest and extortion.

The loose-knit hacktivist network Anonymous in 2010 targeted DNS provider EveryDNS and others as retribution for efforts to block the anti-secrecy organisation WikiLeaks.

Roland Dobbins, principal engineer at the networks security company Arbor Networks, told AFP that, though it was spectacular, the attack was a constant and relentless fact of life on the Internet.

“It’s like a combination of the Wild West, Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge on the Internet every day,” he said.

He felt that the attack’s scale did not necessarily mean the attackers had large resources.

“It does not require a nation-state to launch a DDoS attack of this magnitude or impact,” he said. “When it comes to DDoS attacks, states are just another player.”

James Scott, co-founder of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, said the attacks demonstrated well-known vulnerabilities of the Internet.

“Simply put, the Internet in its original and modern form was not designed with security in mind,” he told AFP.</s>Mirai is a malware that took down a bunch of internet services by breaking into home devices. — Illustration: Wikimedia Commons

On October 21, 2016, a bevy of services suffered internet outage after having been infected by a malware called Mirai that targets smart devices.

Happy about your latest Google Home purchase? Or any other smart home device that makes your life easier by providing you the benefits of the Internet of Things? Well, here's something to be wary of: your trusty automated home devices could be transformed into a malicious army of bots that hold your life ransom.

Sound scary? This is what happened on Friday, as major tech companies like Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Amazon, Spotify — which are catered to by major DNS service-provider called DYN — suffered malfunctions in their service, an internet outage, because of a malware attack. A DNS essentially helps the computer make sense of a website name by linking it with its IP address.

This malware, now identified as 'Mirai', essentially infects Internet-of-Things devices, floods them with artificial commands and causes them to shut down under a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack — which means that the devices simply go dead and refuse to perform their functions because of server overload.

DYN said in an interview to CNBC that the "attacks were well-planned and executed, coming from tens of millions of IP addresses at the same time".

Mirai, FYI, has been known to have been responsible for the recent massive attack on cybersecurity news outlet KrebsOnSecurity. It is a botnet malware that was created by someone with the alias of Anna-Senpai, a name that is believed to be a reference to a Japanese novel series Shimoseka, which depicts a dystopian policed world somewhat like George Orwell's 1984.

How does Mirai do its dirty work?

Mirai runs brute-force scans of default usernames and passwords used by the home devices. Usually, owners of these gadgets use very weak login credentials — usernames and passwords — either because they prioritise ease-of-use and convenience or because of the apparently harmless nature of home appliances.

Once the botnet identifies devices that still use default login credentials, it takes control of the gadget and proceeds to pump forged user requests into the service's network, causing its server to shut down and the website to go offline.

Mirai can affect a bunch of IoT devices, including CCTV cameras, TV video-recorder or even your digital refrigerator.

Who could be responsible for the attack?

It is anybody's guess, really. Because, the Mirai source code was recently leaked and made publicly available by Anna-Senpai on Hackforums, according to KrebsOnSecurity.

What can owners of smart devices do now?

Well, as with most things under the sun, you can reboot your device. But be warned, the botnets are so industrious that they are running scans constantly. So, it is highly likely that your device could be infected again the moment it reboots.

According to ISP and telco Level 3, users may be advised to upgrade their devices and set strong passwords for starters, thereby making it harder for Mirai and other such IoT botnets to crack hack into them. Another way is for ISPs to set up protection against 'spoofing', which is what the botnet does when it impersonates the users and spurts out a flurry of nonsensical commands and floods the traffic.</s>Withering cyberattacks on server farms of a key internet firm repeatedly disrupted access to major websites and online services including Twitter, Netflix and PayPal across the United States on Friday. The White House called the disruption malicious and a hacker group claimed responsibility, though its assertion couldn’t be verified.

Manchester, New Hampshire-based Dyn Inc. said its data centers were hit by three waves of distributed denial-of-service attacks, which overwhelm targeted machines with junk data traffic. The attacks, shifting geographically, had knock-on effects for users trying to access popular websites across the U.S. even in Europe.

“The complexity of the attacks is what is making it so difficult for us,” said Kyle York, the company’s chief strategy officer. “What they are actually doing is moving around the world with each attack.” He said an East Coast data center was hit first; attacks on an offshore target followed later.

The data flood came from tens of millions of different Internet-connected machines — including increasingly popular but highly insecure household devices such as web-connected cameras. It was an onslaught whose global shifts suggested a sophisticated attacker, though Dyn said it had neither suspect nor motive.

The level of disruption was difficult to gauge, but Dyn serves some of the biggest names on the web, providing the domain name services that translate the numerical internet addresses into human-readable destinations such as “twitter.com.”

Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at Intel Security, compared an outage at a domain name services company to tearing up a map or turning off GPS before driving to the department store. “It doesn’t matter that the store is fully open or operational if you have no idea how to get there,” he said in a telephone interview.

Jason Read, founder of the internet performance monitoring firm CloudHarmony, owned by Gartner Inc., said his company tracked a half-hour-long disruption early Friday in which roughly one in two end users would have found it impossible to access various websites from the East Coast.

“We’ve been monitoring Dyn for years and this is by far the worst outage event that we’ve observed,” said Read.

Dyn provides services to some 6 percent of America’s Fortune 500 companies, he said. A full list of affected companies wasn’t immediately available but Twitter, Netflix, PayPal and the coder hangout Github said they experienced problems.

Members of a shadowy collective that calls itself New World Hackers claimed responsibility for the attack via Twitter. They said they organized networks of connected “zombie” computers called botnets that threw a staggering 1.2 terabits per second of data at the Dyn-managed servers.

“We didn’t do this to attract federal agents, only test power,” two collective members who identified themselves as “Prophet” and “Zain” told an AP reporter via Twitter direct message exchange. They said more than 10 members participated in the attack. It was not immediately possible to verify the claim.

Dyn officials said they have received no claim of responsibility, but are working with law enforcement.

The collective, @NewWorldHacking on Twitter, has in the past claimed responsibility for similar attacks against sites including ESPN.com in September and the BBC on Dec. 31. The attack on the BBC marshaled half the computing power of Friday’s onslaught.

The collective has also claimed responsibility for cyberattacks against Islamic State. The two said about 30 people have access to the @NewWorkdHacking Twitter account. They claim 20 are in Russia and 10 in China. “Prophet” said he is in India. “Zain” said he is in China. The two claimed to their actions were “good,” presumably because they highlighted internet security problems.

Another collective member the AP previously communicated with via direct message called himself “Ownz” and identified himself as a 19-year-old in London. He told the AP that the group — or at least he — sought only to expose security vulnerabilities.

During the attack on the ESPN site, “Ownz” was asked if the collective made any demands on sites it attacked, such as demanding blackmail money. “We will make one demand actually. Secure your website and get better servers, otherwise be attacked again,” he said.

For James Norton, the former deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security who now teaches on cybersecurity policy at Johns Hopkins University, the incident was an example of how attacks on key junctures in the network can yield massive disruption.

“I think you can see how fragile the internet network actually is,” he said.

Dyn officials said attacks stemmed from tens of millions of devices connected to the internet — closed-circuit video cameras, digital video recorders and even thermostats — that were infected with malware.

“The Internet of Things sort of ran way ahead of how the Internet was architected,” Dyn’s York said on a call with reporters. He said there are between 10-15 billion such devices online.

Dyn first became aware of an attack around 7 a.m. local time, focused on data centers on the East Coast of the U.S. Services were restored about two hours later. But then attackers shifted to offshore data centers, and problems continue.

“It is a very smart attack. As we start to mitigate they react and start to throw something that’s over the top,” York said on a call with reporters.

The second attack broadened its net, affecting the U.S. West Coast. “Prophet” of New World Hackers said hacktivists of the broad, more amorphous Anonymous collective piled on in the third wave on Friday afternoon.

“We’ve stopped all our attacks,” he said at midafternoon. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was monitoring the situation, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Friday. He said he had no information about who may be behind the disruption.

Security experts have recently expressed concern over increasing power of denial-of-service attacks following high-profile electronic assaults against investigative journalist Brian Krebs and French internet service provider OVH .

In a widely shared essay titled “Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet,” respected security expert Bruce Schneier said last month that major internet infrastructure companies were seeing a series of worrying denial-of-service attacks.

“Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical internet services,” he said.

Satter reported from London, Bajak from Houston. Bree Fowler in Baltimore, Maryland, contributed to this report.</s>Dyn, one of the nation's largest domain name system (DNS) providers, confirmed a large-scale hack took down more than a dozen major websites early Friday, slowing—and in some cases halting—internet traffic to, Twitter, Pandora, Netflix, Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify, PayPal and the PlayStation Network.“We have been aggressively mitigating the DDoS attack against our infrastructure,” Scott Hilton, a vice president at Dyn, said in a statement provided to The Atlantic. 

 

 Additionally, Amazon said it had found—but did not specify—the root cause of DNS problems affecting its East Coast cloud customers. Amazon had said it was looking into an elevated number of errors related to accessing its cloud services in a main East Coast server hub due to DNS issues. By mid-morning, Amazon said the problem "had been resolved and the service is operating normally." In a report titled "When the Entire Internet Seems to Break at Once,"reporters Robinson Meyer and Adrienne LaFrance wrote "the assault took the form of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) on one of the major companies that provides other companies access to DNS." Hacker News was the first to identify the attack Friday morning and name the sites that were affected. Several sites, including Spotify and GitHub, took to Twitter shortly thereafter to post status updates once the social network was back online. Twitter users quickly pushed the term "DDoS" to top of the site's list of "Trending Topics" in the United States.</s>It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the outages that began in the eastern United States, and then spread to other parts of the country and Western Europe.

The outages were intermittent, making it difficult to identify all the victims. But technology news site Gizmodo named some five dozen sites that were affected by the attack. They included CNN, HBO Now, Mashable, the New York Times, People.com, the Wall Street Journal and Yelp.

U.S. officials told Reuters that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were investigating.

The disruptions come at a time of unprecedented fears about the cyber threat in the United States, where hackers have breached political organizations and election agencies.

Homeland Security last week issued a warning about a powerful new approach for blocking access to websites - hackers infecting routers, printers, smart TVs and other connected devices with malware that turns them into "bot" armies that overwhelm website servers in distributed denial of service attacks.

Dyn said it had resolved one morning attack, which disrupted operations for about two hours, but disclosed a second a few hours later that was causing further disruptions.

Dyn initially said the outage was limited to the eastern United States. Amazon later reported that the issue was affecting users in Western Europe. Twitter and some news sites could not be accessed by some users in London late Friday evening.

PayPal Holdings Inc said that the outage prevented some customers in "certain regions" from making payments. It apologized to customers for the inconvenience and said that its networks had not been hacked.

In addition to the social network Twitter and music-streamer Spotify, the discussion site Reddit, hospitality booking service Airbnb and the Verge news site were among companies whose services were disrupted on Friday.

Amazon.com's web services division, one of the world's biggest cloud computing companies, also reported a related outage, which it said was resolved early Friday afternoon.

Dyn is a Manchester, New Hampshire-based provider of services for managing domain name servers (DNS), which act as switchboards connecting internet traffic. Requests to access sites are transmitted through DNS servers that direct them to computers that host websites.

Its customers include some of the world's biggest corporations and Internet firms, such as Pfizer, Visa, Netflix and Twitter, SoundCloud and BT.

Dyn said it was still trying to determine how the attack led to the outage but that its first priority was restoring service.

Attacking a large DNS provider can create massive disruptions because such firms are responsible for forwarding large volumes of internet traffic.</s>WASHINGTON: Successive cyber attacks took large portions of the internet off line on Friday, rendering major companies including Twitter and Netflix inaccessible to millions of users in the United States and elsewhere.

Multiple times in a single day, the attacks incapacitated a crucial piece of internet infrastructure, frustrating or outright blocking access to websites and exposing vulnerabilities in the overall internet network.

It also commanded the attention of top US security agencies including the Department of Homeland Security.

“DHS and the FBI are aware and are investigating all potential causes” of the outages, a spokeswoman said.

The outages left internet users unable to post messages, shop, watch videos and play games online for parts of the day.

“Holy moly! I haven’t been able to get in here all day! Is there a hashtag for #InternetOutage 2016 yet??” he tweeted.

Dynamic Network Services Inc, which routes and manages internet traffic, said that at about 1100 GMT on Friday that its infrastructure had been hit by a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack in the eastern part of the United States.

The company claimed to have resolved the matter within about two hours but toward 1600 GMT was again responding to an attack.

“Our engineers are continuing to investigate and mitigate several attacks aimed against the Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure,” the company, known as Dyn, said on its website.

Affected websites included Reddit, the crafts marketplace Etsy and the software developer site Github, according to media reports. Others reportedly affected include CNN, The Guardian, Wired, HBO and People as well as the money transfer service PayPal.

A map published by the website downdetector.com initially showed service interruptions across much of the US east coast and in Texas.

However later Friday the affected areas had spread to parts of the Midwest and California. Similar maps for Netflix and Twitter showed areas of outage in Europe.

Amazon Web Services, which hosts some of the most popular sites on the internet, including Netflix and the homestay network Airbnb, said that it had resolved problems by 1310 GMT only to begin addressing similar problems three hours later in a different region.

By late in the day the situation appeared to be stabilizing.

Domain name servers are a crucial element of internet infrastructure, converting numbered Internet Protocol addresses into the domain names that allow users to connect to internet sites.

DDoS attacks involve flooding websites with more traffic than they can handle, making them difficult to access or taking them offline entirely.

Attackers can use them for a range of purposes, including censorship, protest and extortion. The loose-knit hacktivist network Anonymous in 2010 targeted the DNS provider EveryDNS among others as retribution for efforts to block the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks.

Friday’s incident immediately underscored the comingled dependencies of large portions of the internet, with multiple brand-name companies and their users affected by an attack on a single company.

The attacks took on added significance, experts said, as the number of ordinary objects used by consumers go online, joining the so-called “internet of things.”

Roland Dobbins, principal engineer at the networks security company Arbor Networks, told AFP on Friday that, though it was spectacular, the attack was a constant and relentless fact of life on the internet.

“It’s like a combination of the Wild West, Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge on the internet every day,” he said.

He added that the attack’s scale did not necessarily mean the attackers had large resources.

“It does not require a nation-state to launch a DDoS attack of this magnitude or impact,” he said. “When it comes to DDoS attacks, states are just another player.”

According to Verisign, the number of DDoS attacks rose 75 percent year-on-year in the second quarter of this year.

James Scott, co-founder, of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, said the attacks demonstrated well-known vulnerabilities of the internet.

“Simply put, the internet in its original and modern form was not designed with security in mind,” he told AFP.

“Consequently, the DNS servers and other critical infrastructure supporting the global internet have always been tantalizing targets to malicious adversaries intent on disrupting services.” AFP</s>A number of popular websites like Amazon and Netflix were down for some users on Friday morning in what appears to be a massive DDoS attack.

A DDoS attack -- or denial of service -- is an attempt to flood a website with so much traffic that it impairs normal service.

According to tech news forum Hacker News, the outage is a result of an attack on Dyn's DNS server. Dyn manages website domains.

Among the sites that appear to be affected include Twitter (TWTR, Tech30), Etsy (ETSY), Github, Vox, Spotify, Airbnb, Netflix (NFLX, Tech30) and Reddit.

"Starting at [7:00 a.m. ET] on October 21... we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure," the company said in a statement.

Related: No, the presidential election can't be hacked

"This attack is mainly impacting U.S. East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region. Our engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue."

By 9:20 a.m., Dyn said "tthe services have been restored to normal."

While little information is available about the cause or who is behind the attack, companies turned to Twitter to tell customers to stay patient.

"Uh oh, we're having some issues right now and investigating. We'll keep you updated!" tweeted Spotify.

"A global event is affecting an upstream DNS provider. GitHub services may be intermittently available at this time," tweeted GitHub.</s>Social network Twitter, music-streamer Spotify, discussion site Reddit and The Verge news site were among the companies whose services were reported to be down on Friday morning.

Amazon.com Inc's web services division, one of the world's biggest cloud computing companies, also disclosed an outage that lasted several hours on Friday morning. Amazon could not immediately be reached for comment.

It was unclear who was responsible for the Dyn attack, which the company said disrupted operations for about two hours.

It is the latest in an increasingly menacing string of "denial of service" attacks disruptinginternet sites by overwhelming servers with web traffic. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned on Oct. 14 that hackers were infecting routers, printers, smart TVs and other connected devices to build powerful armies of "bots" that can shut down websites.

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Dyn, told Reuters he was not sure if the outages at Dyn and Amazon were connected.

“We provide service to Amazon but theirs is a complex network so it is hard to be definitive about causality at the moment,” he said.

Salesforce.com Inc's Heroku cloud-computing service platform, which runs on Amazon Web Services, disclosed a service outage that it said was related to a denial of service attack "against one of our DNS providers."

Dyn said it was still trying to determine how the attack led to the outage.

"Our first priority over the last couple of hours has been our customers and restoring their performance," Dyn Executive Vice President Scott Hilton said in a statement.

He said the problem was resolved at about 9:20 a.m. EDT (1320 GMT). It earlier reported its engineers were working to respond to an "attack" that mainly affected users on the East Coast.

An FBI representative said she had no immediate comment.

Dyn is a Manchester, New Hampshire-based provider of services for managing domain name servers (DNS), which act as switchboards connecting internet traffic. Requests to access sites are transmitted through DNS servers that direct them to computers that host websites.

Dyn's customers include some of the world's biggest corporations and Internet firms, such as Pfizer, Visa, Netflix and Twitter, SoundCloud and BT.

Attacking a large DNS provider can create massive disruptions because such firms are responsible for forwarding large volumes of internet traffic.
A series of cyberattacks utilizing distributed denial-of-service attacks, targeting networks operated by DNS provider Dyn, makes major Internet platforms and services unavailable to large swaths of users in Europe and North America. Affected companies include Amazon, Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, PayPal, Netflix, and Airbnb.