If you’ve noticed a perceptible slowdown in internet speeds lately, that may not just be your local internet provider trying to cap your download speeds. A massive attack on anti-spam guardian, Spamhaus, has had major repercussions on the rest of the internet.
Spamhaus, based out of London and Geneva, tracks spam back to its sources and relays that information back to the proper authorities. This filtering helps email providers slow down the massive flow of spam and unwanted content that would regularly fill your inboxes with missives about false lotteries, non-existent discounts, and “adult entertainment” offers. Apparently, one or more of these spam sources has sought revenge on Spamhaus for doing its very job. These denial-of-service attacks hit specific website servers with an overwhelming amount of traffic, which then creates a digital dam for information trying to make its way across the world. Some data does end up getting through, but this can cause other vital internet servers to become bogged down where they normally wouldn’t.
The attack became so bad that Spamhaus had to call in San Francisco-based CloudFlare Inc. to help the organization face this affront. Measuring a jaw-dropping and record-breaking 300 billion bits per second, the data overload was akin to a fat man trying to squeeze through a tiny door. The sheet amount of junk data stalled other data from having the ability to find its own way through.
In an email, CloudFlare chief executive Matthew Prince wrote, “It was likely quite a bit more, but at some point measurement systems can’t keep up.”
“These attacks are peaking at 300 gb/s (gigabits per second),” said Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, to the BBC. “Normally when there are attacks against major banks, we’re talking about 50 gb/s.”
Linford also said the attack’s power is of the magnitude that it could easily have taken down a government’s internet infrastructure.
Spamhaus has listed Cyberbunker, a Dutch web host that offers to house anything except child pornography or terrorism-related material, as the main suspect behind the attacks.
Sven Olaf Kamphuis, acting as a spokesman for Cyberbunker, stated that Spamhaus shouldn’t be allowed to decide “what goes and does not go on the internet.” To this end, Spamhaus claims that Cyberbunker has joined with criminal gangs from Eastern Europe and Russia to launch this attack.
As of now, Spamhaus reports that the attack is being investigated by five different national cyber-police-forces from around the world.
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