Cyber attack

A Chinese firm that makes components for surveillance video cameras now admits their technology was used, in part, to carry out the unprecedented strike.

XiongMai Technologies acknowledged that a piece of malware known as "Mirai" that's spreading around the internet targets vulnerabilities in their products.

"Mirai is a huge disaster for the 'Internet of Things,'" XiongMai representative Cooper Wang told CNNMoney in an email. "[We] have to admit that our products also suffered from hackers' break-in and illegal use."

Dyn, an Internet middleman company, was the target of the distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack that hit in three waves. Dyn directs traffic when people type a URL into a browser. So the attack on the company caused temporary outages at many of the internet's most widely-trafficked sites.