Saturday, March 30, 2013

Biggest Cyber Attack in History Slows Down Internet




If your wondering why your net isn't as speedy today, it's not all your providers fault. The conflict ongoing for a week now has been between a non-profit group called Spamhaus and a dutch webhost Cyberbunker.

In March 2013 Spamhaus added Cyberbunker to a blacklist claiming that they host spam websites. This was the catalyst to the biggest cyber attack in history. Shortly afterwards a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack of previously unreported scale (peaking at 300 gigabites per second; an average large scale attack might reach 50 Gbps, and the largest previously publicly reported was 100 Gbps) was launched against Spamhuas's Domain Name System (DNS) servers exploiting a known vulnerability of DN.

After a week of cyber attacks Spamhuas is still undefeated. Spamhuas operates a number of databases linked to spamming, malware, and nefarious content in order for internet service providers to restrict or block access.

In October 2011 Spamhuas identified Cyberbunker as providing hosting for spammers and contacted thier upstream provider A2B, asking that service their be cancelled. A2B initially refused, blocking only a single IP address linked to spamming. Spamhuas responded by blacklisting all of A2B address space. A2B capitulated, dropped Cyberbunker and then filed complaints with the Dutch police for extortion.

Cyberbunker has a long history of run-ins with the law. It was also host of the infamous Russian Business Network cyber crime gang broken up by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

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