Oracle buys Dyn, notorious victim of cyber attack

SAN FRANCISCO — Tech industry giant Oracle announced Monday it has acquired Dyn, the Internet traffic company that was the victim of an epic hack a month ago that knocked out multiple popular sites for much of a day. 

Dyn is a New Hampshire-based company that monitors and routes Internet traffic. On Oct. 21, an unknown attacker took down its routing network, intermittently knocking offline many popular websites such as Amazon, Twitter, Netflix and Etsy that used it.

The purchase price Oracle (ORCL) agreed to pay was not disclosed, though tech writer Dan Primack, quoting an unnamed source, pegged it at slightly more than $600 million. 

Oracle said Dyn will benefit its cloud customers by providing access to Internet-performance information that can help with infrastructure costs, risk management and getting more out of app- and web-driven revenue. 

Dyn “drives 40 billion traffic optimization decisions daily for more than 3,500 enterprise customers,” Oracle said in a release about the purchase.

It's unclear if the deal was in the works prior to the attack. Oracle declined comment.

Dyn made news when it was hit with a "distributed denial of service" or DDoS attack, which floods servers with so many fake requests for information that they cannot respond to real ones, often crashing under the barrage. 

The attacker's tool was an easy-to-use computer program called Mirai that allows even unskilled hackers to take over online devices and use them to launch DDoS attacks. The software uses malware from phishing emails to first infect a computer or home network, then spreads to everything on it, taking over DVRs, cable set-top boxes, routers and even Internet-connected cameras used by stores and businesses for surveillance.

An executive at networking company Level 3 Communications told a Congressional panel last week that he believed a disgruntled gamer orchestrated the attack, the Wall Street Journal reported. The attack was possibly launched to harm the PlayStation Network, but that has not been confirmed.