Cybersecurity, Unscrupulous Diners, and Internet Stewardship

The extended DDoS attacks over the past few days that triggered widespread outages and Internet congestion are more than a mere annoyance. Rather, these instances have proven to be increasingly sophisticated efforts to strike at core networking protocols—the infrastructure that makes the Internet operate—to render large portions of the network inoperable or inaccessible. Perhaps the greatest irony of these complex attacks has been the fact that they have been conducted on the backs of some of the dumbest devices out there—the so-called "smart" devices that make up the Internet of Things (IoT).