Global Internet Slowed Down By "Biggest Cyber-Attack" | TechTree.com

Global Internet Slowed Down By "Biggest Cyber-Attack"

Blame pinned on the Dutch web hosting company; five cyber-police forces said to be investigating the attacks.

 

The global internet is being bogged down by what is said to be "the biggest cyber-attack in history", according to a BBC report. The cause for this is said to be a dispute between the anti-spam group, Spamhaus and the Dutch web host, Cyberbunker. The former has blocked servers maintained by the latter, after it stated that it will host anything except child pornography or material related to terrorism. This has led Cyberbunker to accused Spamhaus of abusing its position and unilaterally moral-policing the internet. The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against Spamhaus' DNS servers is viewed as a retaliatory move by Cyberbunker.

Spamhaus is a non-profit organisation headquartered in London and Geneva, which maintains a blacklisted database of servers that is known to spread malicious content. This helps email providers to filter out spam and other unwanted content. However, it has been alleged by Spamhaus that Cyberbunker is getting help from cyber criminals based out of Eastern Europe and Russia to launch such attack. The BBC report further suggests that the attacks have been happening for over a week, and have now intensified. While they are affecting a few popular services at present, it won't be long before they could adversely affect banking and email systems, and even cause noticeable slowdown in web browsing for end users.

Steve Linford, chief executive of Spamhaus has said that the DDoS attacks are powerful enough to take down even government networks of developed countries. "Normally when there are attacks against major banks, we're talking about 50 Gb/s. These attacks are peaking at 300 Gb/s", he said to BBC. Linford is confident that this attack will be warded off, as he claims that big companies, such as Google, have come forward to help "absorb all of this traffic". Also, Spamhaus has more than 80 servers located in different countries around the world, which makes it difficult take down the entire infrastructure of the group. Linford has also stated that national cyber-police forces from five different countries around the world are said to be investigating the attacks, although he declined to disclose more details, citing concerns that infrastructures of these agencies may be targeted and brought down.

Even as cyber-police around the world tries hard to end this new threat to the internet, it remains to be seen if the attacks on Spamhaus will cease or it will indeed lead to a global internet slowdown.


TAGS: Security, Internet

 
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