Top spy: Friday internet outage likely not caused by foreign power

An internet outage that disrupted traffic across the United States late last week does not appear to have been triggered by a foreign government, the nation’s top intelligence official said Tuesday.

Preliminary evidence suggests that the attack against internet infrastructure company Dyn was instead launched by a non-state actor, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said.

{mosads}”That appears to be preliminarily the case,” Clapper said at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But I wouldn’t want to be conclusively definitive about that, specifically whether a nation state may have been behind that or not.”

Clapper declined to say whether the suspected party was an activist group or a terrorist organization, or whether the incident was merely an act of extreme vandalism.

“The investigation’s still going on,” he said. “There’s a lot of data going on here.”

The Friday outage began around 7 a.m. on the East Coast and later spread to other parts of the country.

Dyn, which helps connect people to websites they are trying to visit, was flooded with engineered traffic in what is known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The company has described the attack as unprecedented and involving tens of millions of internet protocol (IP) addresses as well as a network of computers infected with malicious software.