Angry gamers may have been behind last year’s web-breaking DDoS attack

Last October, a flood of traffic from the Mirai botnet brought down major portions of the internet, blocking access to Amazon, Netflix, and other services for most of the northeastern US. It was a painful reminder of the fragility of the internet and the danger of insecure Internet of Things devices — but despite the broad scale of the damage, new research presented today at the Usenix conference suggests the attackers may have just been trying to kick people off PlayStation.

The new report comes from a team of researchers at Google, Cloudflare, Merit Networks, Akamai, and a range of university partners, drawing on data from some of the largest infrastructure networks on the web. Looking at the October attack on DNS provider Dyn,...

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