[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4ZLqayQ-04]World Wide War: Biggest cyber-attack shakes web - YouTube[/ame]

 

'Biggest ever attack' slows internet

 

The internet around the world has been slowed down in what security experts are describing as the biggest cyber-attack of its kind in history.

 

A row between a spam-fighting group and hosting firm has sparked retaliation attacks affecting the wider internet. It is having an impact on popular services like Netflix - and experts worry it could escalate to affect banking and email systems.

 

Five national cyber-police-forces are investigating the attacks. Spamhaus, a group based in both London and Geneva, is a non-profit organisation which aims to help email providers filter out spam and other unwanted content.

 

To do this, the group maintains a number of blocklists - a database of servers known to be being used for malicious purposes. Recently, Spamhaus blocked servers maintained by Cyberbunker, a Dutch web host which states it will host anything with the exception of child pornography or terrorism-related material.

 

Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who claims to be a spokesman for Cyberbunker, said, in a message, that Spamhaus was abusing its position, and should not be allowed to decide "what goes and does not go on the internet".

 

Spamhaus has alleged that Cyberbunker, in cooperation with "criminal gangs" from Eastern Europe and Russia, is behind the attack. Cyberbunker has not responded to the BBC's request for comment. Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, told the BBC the scale of the attack was unprecedented.

 

"We've been under this cyber-attack for well over a week. "But we're up - they haven't been able to knock us down. Our engineers are doing an immense job in keeping it up - this sort of attack would take down pretty much anything else."

 

Mr Linford told the BBC that the attack was being investigated by five different national cyber-police-forces around the world. He claimed he was unable to disclose more details because the forces were concerned that they too may suffer attacks on their own infrastructure.

 

The attackers have used a tactic known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which floods the intended target with large amounts of traffic in an attempt to render it unreachable. In this case, Spamhaus's Domain Name System (DNS) servers were targeted - the infrastructure that joins domain names, such as bbc.co.uk, the website's numerical internet protocol address.

 

Mr Linford said the attack's power would be strong enough to take down government internet infrastructure. "If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly," he said. "They would be completely off the internet."

 

He added: "These attacks are peaking at 300 gb/s (gigabits per second). "Normally when there are attacks against major banks, we're talking about 50 gb/s."

 

The knock-on effect is hurting internet services globally, said Prof Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey.

 

"If you imagine it as a motorway, attacks try and put enough traffic on there to clog up the on and off ramps," he told the BBC. "With this attack, there's so much traffic it's clogging up the motorway itself."

 

Arbor Networks, a firm which specialises in protecting against DDoS attacks, also said it was the biggest such attack they had seen.

 

"The largest DDoS attack that we have witnessed prior to this was in 2010, which was 100 gb/s. Obviously the jump from 100 to 300 is pretty massive," said Dan Holden, the company's director of security research. There's certainly possibility for some collateral damage to other services along the way, depending on what that infrastructure looks like."

 

Spamhaus said it was able to cope as it has highly distributed infrastructure in a number of countries. The group is supported by many of the world's largest internet companies who rely on it to filter unwanted material. Mr Linford told the BBC that several companies, such as Google, had made their resources available to help "absorb all of this traffic".

 

The attacks typically happened in intermittent bursts of high activity. "They are targeting every part of the internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down," Mr Linford said. "Spamhaus has more than 80 servers around the world. We've built the biggest DNS server around."

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21954636

I didn't notice a thing :\

Yeah, me neither. What amateurs.

I actually have noticed alot of these, actually. Sites like Wikipedia, WebCite, Tumblr, Twitter< YouTube and most of the vBulletin boards like our own coldplaying, and various websites I've been to have been on and off alot. The websites are usually down for like around 5 seconds or such, but very frequently this week. Some sites like Tumblr and the social networks take roughly 5 minutes to come back up. I've seen Facebook down at least four times this week alone.

^ :nod: Facebook indeed.

I don't notice anything different being on 512kbps connection, completely oblivious

I have pretty bad internet and I've noticed it's been worse lately, yes. I think most people with a fast connection wouldn't notice as much because not many are going to notice a page that should instantly load instead taking half a second, so unless you watch your speed you wouldn't notice it.

 

For me it is sometimes taking 10-15 seconds to load just a normal page, it used to be a few seconds at worse.

Hmmm interesting a few days ago certain sites I was on radomly cut off for me at times, but I chalked it up to my internet connection.

Dutchman arrested over huge web attack

 

Spamhaus runs lists that log sources of junk mail and other malicious messages

 

Dutchman arrested over huge web attack

 

Spanish police have arrested a Dutchman suspected of being behind one of the biggest ever web attacks.

 

The 35 year-old-man was detained in Barcelona following a request from the Dutch public prosecutor.

 

The attack bombarded the websites of anti-junk mail outfit Spamhaus with huge amounts of data in an attempt to knock them offline.

 

It also slowed data flows over closely linked networks and led to a massive police investigation.

 

The man arrested is believed to be Sven Kamphuis, the owner and manager of Dutch hosting firm Cyberbunker that has been implicated in the attack.

 

"Spamhaus is delighted at the news that an individual has been arrested and is grateful to the Dutch police for the resources they have made available and the way they have worked with us," said a Spamhaus spokesman.

 

He added: "Spamhaus remains concerned about the way network resources are being exploited as they were in this incident due to the failure of network providers to implement best practice in security."

 

Spamhaus servers were hit with a huge amount of data via an attack technique known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This attempts to overwhelm a web server by sending it many more requests for data than it can handle.

 

A typical DDoS attack employs about 50 gigabits of data every second (gbps). At its peak the attack on Spamhaus hit 300 gbps.

 

Cyberbunker is thought to have kicked off the attack in late March after Spamhaus blocked some servers hosted by the Dutch firm. Cyberbunker bills itself as a firm that will host anything but child pornography and terrorism material.

 

Non-profit Spamhaus maintains what are known as "block lists" which many organisations use to spot sources of spam and other junk mail to stop them clogging mail servers and inboxes with unwanted messages.

 

Mr Kamphuis took exception to Spamhaus's action saying in messages sent to the press that it had no right to decide "what goes and does not go on the internet".

 

In a statement, the Dutch public prosecutor said the Dutchman, who it only identifies as "SK", was "suspected of unprecedented heavy attacks" on Spamhaus. The house where SK was stayed was searched at the time of his arrest and Spanish police confiscated computers, phones and hard drives.

 

It said it expected SK to be transferred to the Netherlands very soon. A spokesman for the Dutch police said they were co-operating with British and American authorities on the investigation into the attack.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22314938

Exploded my brain, completely.

But, I never noticed anything. My internet connection is always up 50Mbps.

I never noticed anything either. Weird