Global Internet Slowed by Massive Cyberattack Against One Company..............
One of the largest ever cyber attacks is slowing global internet services and the disruption could get worse, experts said on Wednesday, after an organization blocking "spam" content became a target.
A massive and relatively new form of cyberattack aimed at a sole company is dragging parts of the global Internet down with it, interrupting services and causing traffic slowdowns particularly in Europe.
The attack — which some experts are calling the biggest in history — is aimed at Spamhaus, a anti-spam company based in Geneva and London that flags websites it considers bogus. Spamhaus sells its blacklists to Internet Service Providers, which often blocks the hosts flagged therein. According to experts, it's estimated to be responsible for blocking up to 80% of the global e-mail spam.
"Based on the reported scale of the attack, which was evaluated at 300 Gigabits per second, we can confirm that this is one of the largest DDoS operations to date," online security firm Kaspersky Lab said in a statement.
The attack, then, has been clogging essential Internet infrastructure, which is why it's causing Internet services and users across the world to experience shutdowns or slowdowns.
What's going on?
Spamhaus is a non-profit that — you guessed it — helps organizations fight spam and other unwanted stuff by providing them with content filters. The company keeps tabs of malicious servers on exhaustive blacklists. The trouble began when Spamhaus blacklisted a Dutch company called Cyberbunker, a service that offers hosting to any kind of website "except child porn and anything related to terrorism." A Cyberbunker spokesman said that Spamhaus was abusing its power, and should not be allowed to decide "what goes and does not go on the Internet."
So who's attacking whom?
Spamhaus says Cyberbunker has been retaliating with a powerful denial of service, or DDoS, attack. The attacks, which Spamhaus claims started on March 19, are reaching "previously unknown magnitudes, growing to a data stream of 300 billion bits per second," says the New York Times. (For comparison, similar DDoS attacks that crippled major banks peaked at 50 billion bits.) "It's a real number," says Patrick Gilmore, chief architect of Akamai Technologies, a digital content provider. "It is the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet."
One of the largest ever cyber attacks is slowing global internet services and the disruption could get worse, experts said on Wednesday, after an organization blocking "spam" content became a target.
A massive and relatively new form of cyberattack aimed at a sole company is dragging parts of the global Internet down with it, interrupting services and causing traffic slowdowns particularly in Europe.
The attack — which some experts are calling the biggest in history — is aimed at Spamhaus, a anti-spam company based in Geneva and London that flags websites it considers bogus. Spamhaus sells its blacklists to Internet Service Providers, which often blocks the hosts flagged therein. According to experts, it's estimated to be responsible for blocking up to 80% of the global e-mail spam.
"Based on the reported scale of the attack, which was evaluated at 300 Gigabits per second, we can confirm that this is one of the largest DDoS operations to date," online security firm Kaspersky Lab said in a statement.
The attack, then, has been clogging essential Internet infrastructure, which is why it's causing Internet services and users across the world to experience shutdowns or slowdowns.
What's going on?
Spamhaus is a non-profit that — you guessed it — helps organizations fight spam and other unwanted stuff by providing them with content filters. The company keeps tabs of malicious servers on exhaustive blacklists. The trouble began when Spamhaus blacklisted a Dutch company called Cyberbunker, a service that offers hosting to any kind of website "except child porn and anything related to terrorism." A Cyberbunker spokesman said that Spamhaus was abusing its power, and should not be allowed to decide "what goes and does not go on the Internet."
So who's attacking whom?
Spamhaus says Cyberbunker has been retaliating with a powerful denial of service, or DDoS, attack. The attacks, which Spamhaus claims started on March 19, are reaching "previously unknown magnitudes, growing to a data stream of 300 billion bits per second," says the New York Times. (For comparison, similar DDoS attacks that crippled major banks peaked at 50 billion bits.) "It's a real number," says Patrick Gilmore, chief architect of Akamai Technologies, a digital content provider. "It is the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet."
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