In October 2016, the world has seen the most powerful Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack ever registered in cyber history.

The destructive Mirai botnet has brought down sites including Twitter, the Guardian, Netflix, Reddit, CNN and many others in Europe and the United States after it hit the servers of Dyn, a company that controls much of the internet’s domain name system (DNS) infrastructure.

What makes Mirai botnet different from other botnets – which are typically made up of computers – is that it is largely made up of so-called “internet of things” (IoT) devices such as digital cameras and DVR players.

Experts pointed out that attacks from Mirai are much larger than what most DDoS attacks could previously achieve because it has so many internet-connected devices to choose from.