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(Image Source: Wikipedia)
BY ALEX MALLIN
What started
as a dispute between an anti-spam group and a website hosting firm has escalated into
what experts are calling the biggest cyber attack in history.
It all started when the London and Geneva-based spam fighting group Spamhaus decided to add
the web host “Cyberbunker” to its blacklist, a list it distributes to ISP’s and other
internet companies. (Via Spamhaus)
Cyberbunker, which is literally located
in an underground NATO bunker in the Netherlands, claims to host any website except those related
to child *** or terrorism. (Via Wikipedia)
A group called the Stophaus Movement accuses
Spamhaus of acting like the Internet’s police, and say when they heard about Cyberbunker’s
addition to the blacklist they began to attack the site.
It claims to have initiated what is called a “denial of service attack”, in which
users coordinate a server overload by repeatedly submitting access requests to the site. (Via
Daily Mail)
But this attack reportedly uses a network
of computers around the world that have been infected with malware to carry out the access
requests — often without the computer’s owner knowing.
It’s such a massive attack that experts are comparing it to an Internet-wide traffic
jam that has slowed servers and disrupted sites on a global scale. (via San Francisco
Gate)
“Experts disagree. Some people are saying
that this highlights a vulnerability that if people were determined enough people could
exploit in a very serious way and could cause widespread damage." (Via BBC)
To put it in perspective, last year the US banking system experienced several outages
during a denial of service attack that was peaking at about 100 billion bits per second.
(Via The New York Times)
This one was reportedly clocked at 300
billion bits per second, so powerful it caused a stir in the Internet’s main infrastructure,
known as the Domain Name System. (Via Fox News)
Experts say it could be the reason for an influx of complaints from popular sites
like Netflix who have reported slower-than-usual servers. (Via The Independent)
Spamhaus announced that it has been fending off the cyber attack for the past week, and
a security expert says that arresting the suspected hackers may be the only way to stop
the damage. (Via RT)
Five separate international police organizations
are reportedly investigating the incident.