DDOS attack 2013: SpamHaus internet attack and scary thought of cyber war - Northern Voices Online

DDOS attack 2013 has brought the world to its knees. SpamHaus internet attack is giving me scary thought of what happens if cyber war actually breaks out between two nations

The slowdown of internet across the world is still not over. Experts are of the opinion that such a huge attack for such a long time is unprecedented and shows the shortcomings of internet safety and security for the whole world. If such spam attacks can bring the internet world onto its knees, what will happen if in case of war, governments stop doing the same thing on a far higher level and far more sophisticated style.

The way many countries across the world are preparing for cyber warfare, it seems quite catastrophic and the DDOS attack on Spamhaus looks primitive if these governments both belonging to the United States, European Union, Russia and China unleash their well oiled cyber warfare techniques to on the world. This may actually spell doom not just for information available across the world, but also for online business, online shopping malls, flow of emails and a host of other services available across the world. Any attack by these government, including the ones by rogue governments would be very tough to deal for the world and common users would be the ones who will be hit hardest.

But the more than week-long DDOS attack is still continuing. The biggest ever Distributed Denial of Service attacks by Dutch web host CyberBunker against anti-spam agency SpamHaus was carried out last week. However, most of us were almost unaware of such massive DDoS attack. In fact, the attacks generated so much Distributed Denial of Service traffic that they slowed down various sectors of the Internet for a small period of time. Many of the ordinary users experienced interruptions in service or even could not open a website for a short period of time. However, the problem seemed more troublesome for the Internet engineers who manage the global network. According to some computer experts, the attack seemed to be so powerful that if it continues to shoot up then people around the world may actually not be able to access even basic Internet services such as email, online banking or social networks. The whole thing started when the anti spam agency, SpamHaus, added the Dutch web host firm CyberBunker to its blac
There are more details coming out. klist which is used by email providers to get rid of spam. The Dutch company, CyberBunker, a five-story former abandoned NATO bunker in the Netherlands, provides web hosting to diverse collection of websites "except child porn and anything related to terrorism," according to its Web site. Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer of a San Francisco-based company, CloudFlare, that have been helping out SpamHaus for the past few days, said that the DDoS attacks began on March 19 and have produced almost 300 GBps of DDoS traffic but he added that, SpamHaus has not stopped distributing their blacklist. "We haven't seen anything larger than this publicly," Prince said. "Its hard to get an attack this large, because what you end up doing is congesting [portions of the Internet]," Prince said. According to Prince, the DDoS attacks on SpamHaus were minor initially but gradually got bigger. The DDoS attacks grew from 10GBps to more than 90GBps of traffic from March 19 to March 22. "These things are essentially like nuclear bombs," said Matthew Prince of CloudFlare. "It's so easy to cause so much damage."

Meanwhile Spamhouse is releasing more info on the topic. Earlier, blacklisted sites would strike back against Spamhaus with denial-of-service attacks, in which they downpour Spamhaus with traffic requests from personal computers until their servers become inaccessible. However, last week, the assailants smacked back with a powerful strike that subjugated the core infrastructure of the Internet, called the Domain Name System, or DNS. Sven Olaf Kamphuis, an Internet activist who claimed to be a spokesman for the attackers, said, "We are aware that this is one of the largest DDoS attacks the world had publicly seen." Mr. Olaf Kamphuis said Cyberbunker was striking back against Spamhaus for "abusing their influence." "Nobody ever deputized Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the Internet," Mr. Olaf Kamphuis said. "They worked themselves into that position by pretending to fight spam."