The last week has seen probably the largest distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever. A massive 300Gbps was thrown
against Internet blacklist maintainer Spamhaus' website but the
anti-spam organisation , CloudFlare was able to recover from the attack
and get its core services back up and running. Spamhaus, a group based in both London and Geneva, is a non-profit
organisation that aims to help email providers filter out spam and other
unwanted content. Spamhaus is pretty resilient, as its own network is
distributed across many countries, but the attack was still enough to
knock its site offline on March 18.
Five national cyber-police-forces are investigating the attacks. A group calling itself STOPhaus, an alliance of hactivists and cyber criminals is believed to responsible for bombarding Spamhaus with up to 300Gbps. The attacks on Spamhaus illustrate a larger problem with the
vulnerability of systems fundamental to the architecture of the
Internet, the Domain Name Servers (DNS).
It now seems that the attack is being orchestrated by a Dutch hosting company called CyberBunker. As
long as it's not child porn and anything related to terrorism,
CyberBunker will host it, including sending spam. Spamhaus blacklisted
CyberBunker earlier in the month.
The DDoS attacks have raised concerns that further escalations of the
retaliatory attacks could affect banking and email systems. DDoS attacks
are typically carried out to extort money from targeted organisations
or as a weapon to disrupt organisations or companies in pursuit of
ideological, political or personal interests.
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