A cyber attack described as the
largest in history is currently underway, and it's apparently all because of an
argument over some spam.
The Spamhaus Project, based in both
London and Geneva, produces lists of email addresses and servers that are known
to send out things that most people won't want, from penis enlargement scams to
malware and viruses. Its decisions are incredibly influential, and it seems as
though someone isn't too happy about being blocked, since right now, a vast
cyber attack is directed right at Spamhaus, threatening the internet's core
infrastructure.
The distributed denial of service
(DDoS) attacks are so large that, currently, they're peaking
at a reported 300gb/s (that's three hundred gigabits a second) of data. For
comparison, that's roughly a sixth the practical functioning capacity of one of
the major transatlantic cables, TAT-14. Most people are judging this to be the largest DDoS attack in the history of
the internet. Spamhaus's Vincent Hanna confirmed that this was the largest such
attack aimed at Spamhaus so far, and confirmed that it could
"certainly" affect internet traffic elsewhere.
He said: "Core internet
infrastructure may get overwhelmed by the amount of traffic involved in an
attack. When this happens other traffic may get impacted too. Compare it to a
big highway: If the traffic jam gets big enough the onramps will slow down and
fill up, and the roads to the onramps will fill up too."
According to a blog on the site of web security company Cloudfare (we were
directed to it by Hanna), the first attack happened on 18 March. It said:
"The attack was large enough that the Spamhaus team wasn't sure of its
size when they contacted us. It was sufficiently large to fully saturate their
connection to the rest of the internet and knock their site offline. These very
large attacks, which are known as Layer 3 attacks, are difficult to stop with
any on-premise solution. Put simply: if you have a router with a 10Gbps port,
and someone sends you 11Gbps of traffic, it doesn't matter what intelligent
software you have to stop the attack because your network link is completely saturated."
The attacks have been continuing
since then, growing larger and larger in size. For most people, there's one
main suspect. Last month, Spamhaus added the servers of Cyberbunker to its spam
lists. Cyberbunker is a server company based in a decommissioned Nato bunker in
the Dutch town of Kloetinge. Outside of the bunker live dozens of rabbits; inside are servers which host everything "except child
porn and anything related to terrorism", according to its website.
The sheer quantiy of spam emanating from Cyberbunker's servers (showing as the address
"cb3rob.net") led Spamhaus to block all of its traffic, a decision
which infuriated many people. Cyberbunker has been linked with criminal gangs
from Russia and other Eastern European nations, contributing to Spamhaus's
decision to block its traffic.
This isn't the first large attack on Spamhaus -- as you might expect, an
organisation dedicated to stopping spam and scammers isn't going to be popular
with some shady people -- but it is remarkable in it scale.
Hanna said: "Some people online
claim that we are not accountable and can just 'censor' anything we want. This
is obviously not the case. Not only do we have to operate within the boundaries
of the law, we are also accountable to our users. If we started advising our
users not to accept mail from certain places where they actually do want email
from, they would be very quick to stop using our data because it's obviously
not working right for them."
The attacks
coincide with the launch of a new initiative by the British government to help
businesses and law enforcement agencies better share information on cyber
attacks, which has been rather optimistically likened to a "secure Facebook".
Cyber crimes units are currently looking into the Spamhaus attacks. [Source]
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