Have you noticed the internet going really slowly in the last few days? Well, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you did, as it has been under attack. In fact, it has been described as the largest cyber attack in the history of the world.
It apparently all kicked off with a fight between a Dutch hosting firm called Cyberbunker and an anti spam organisation called Spamhaus, which has bases in both the UK and Switzerland. The attacks are so serious that there are currently police forces in 5 different countries involved in the investigation.
How It All started
Spamhaus has one of its aims as helping internet users stop unwanted messages getting to their email inboxes. Part of their work involves having a group of blocklists, which include the servers which they already know get used for malicious reasons. They blocked the servers of Cyberbunker, with the Dutch hosting firm having already said that they will host anything as long as it isn’t related to terrorism or child pornography.
A Cyberbunker spokesman called Sven Olaf Kamphuis said that it is not the role of Spamhaus to make decisions on “what goes and does not to” online.
Now Spamhaus has been the subject of a sustained cyber attack and they claim that Cyberbunker has used “criminal” groups in Eastern Europe to do this. The attack has been going on for more than a week and the size and intensity of it has been called “unprecedented”.
The attacks involve DDoS (distributed denial of service) tactics and are reaching 300 gigabits per second, which is vastly superior to the intensity of the attacks which we usually see against the likes of banks and government sites. In fact, before this the record attack was of 100 gigabits per second. The strength of the attack has affected the response times of sites all across the internet.
