WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. government said Monday that it will release in the coming weeks a set of principles for securing the Internet of Things, or Internet-connected devices, which were employed partly by hackers to carry out Friday's cyberattacks that disrupted major U.S. websites.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said Monday his department is "closely monitoring" events arising from the distributed denial of service attacks on a domain name services company called Dyn on Friday, which caused major services such as Twitter, Paypal and some other U.S. websites to be inaccessible for about two hours for many users, especially those on the U.S. East Coast.
According to Johnson, his department has convened a conference call of about 18 major communication service providers to share information about the incident later that day.
"At this time, we believe the attack has been mitigated," Johnson said in a statement. "We have shared relevant information with our partners."
Johnson said this incident was partly carried out by a malware called Mirai that compromises Internet of Things devices, such as surveillance cameras and entertainment systems connected to the Internet.
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