Internet, whether for innovations, fighting pirates, or selling groundbreaking ideas that have captivated the planet, continues to capture all attention and challenges us to do without it.
Worldwide Outage “Not Caused” by Cyberattack The global internet outage that affected banks and airlines worldwide on Thursday was not caused by a cyberattack, American service provider Akamai said on Friday. This outage impacted airlines like American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and Southwest Airlines, as well as most major banks in Australia, depriving their customers of access to their websites and apps. The American service provider stated in a release that around 500 of its customers were deprived of internet connection due to an issue with one of its security products on the network.
According to Akamai, the problem was resolved in a little over four hours, but most websites were only offline for about an hour. The origin of the outage was a data routing issue related to a product aimed at preventing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
This incident is the latest in a series of events focusing attention on the stability of internet platforms vital to the economy and the key role played by a handful of mostly unknown companies in the functioning of the web. Last week, US government and media websites, including the White House, the New York Times, and Amazon, were temporarily offline due to an issue with the American company Fastly, which provides a service to accelerate the loading speed of internet pages.
DataDome, the Startup Fighting Malicious Bots The French startup has developed a SaaS solution that helps companies protect themselves against cyberattacks carried out by bots. It has just completed a €30 million fundraising round and aims to strengthen its presence in the United States. Founded in 2015, DataDome has developed a solution that helps companies protect themselves against cyberattacks carried out by malicious bots. These attacks can take several forms: data scraping, account takeover, DDoS attacks, payment fraud, etc. “There are always hackers behind the bots,” reminds Fabien Grenier, the CEO of DataDome.
“The bot is a vector that multiplies the power of an attack. For example, it allows you to target tens of thousands of IP addresses or attack a dozen or so locations simultaneously.” DataDome has developed a SaaS solution for detecting bots, powered by AI. The startup claims 160 clients, including Rakuten, Blablacar, La Redoute, La Fourchette, Saint Gobain, Axel Springer, and the New York Times. It’s a rapidly growing market.
World Wide Web Creator Sells His Own Creation as an NFT Auction Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, is auctioning off his own creation as an NFT. The auction will start at $1,000 and proceeds will go to charity. From June 23 to 30, the sale to obtain this valuable NFT, titled “This Changed Everything,” will be conducted by the auction house Sotheby’s. The buyer of the NFT will receive the original files containing the source code written by Tim Berners-Lee, consisting of approximately 9,555 lines of code. These include three languages and protocols: HTML, HTTP, and URIs, as well as the original HTML documents that helped the web’s first users understand how to use it. NFTs allow anyone to own a digital work. These tokens are governed by a secure digital channel called “blockchain,” which provides complete transparency on the transactions involved.
But why become an owner? It’s because no NFT is identical to another, and they appear as collectible items. Today, many sectors use these tokens, such as art or fashion. Several works have been acquired this way. In March 2021, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet for 2.9 million NFTs. But the wealth of NFT owners is limited to very theoretical rights, as the works they acquire are still accessible online, and above all, duplicable.
