Record-Breaking cyber attack hits anti-spam group

[mmadhankumar]

Spamhaus, a site responsible for keeping ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills out of the world's inboxes, said it had been buffeted by the monster denial-of-service attack since mid-March, apparently from groups angry at being blacklisted by the Swiss-British group. "It is a small miracle that we're still online," Spamhaus researcher Vincent Hanna said.

Denial-of-service attacks overwhelm a server with traffic - like hundreds of letters being jammed through a mail slot at the same time. Security experts measure those attacks in bits of data per second. Recent cyberattacks - like the ones that caused persistent outages at U.S. banking sites late last year - have tended to peak at 100 billion bits per second.

But the furious assault on Spamhaus has shattered the charts, clocking in at 300 billion bits per second, according to San Francisco-based CloudFlare Inc., which Spamhaus has enlisted to help it weather the attack.

"It was likely quite a bit more, but at some point measurement systems can't keep up," CloudFlare chief executive Matthew Prince wrote in an email.

Patrick Gilmore of Akamai Technologies said that was no understatement.

"This attack is the largest that has been publicly disclosed - ever - in the history of the Internet," he said.

It's unclear who exactly was behind the attack, although a man who identified himself as Sven Olaf Kamphuis said he was in touch with the attackers and described them as mainly consisting of disgruntled Russian Internet service providers who had found themselves on Spamhaus' blacklists. There was no immediate way to verify his claim.


Record-Breaking cyber attack hits anti-spam group - Indian Express

 

[mmadhankumar]

here are few more links about the topic....

World's biggest DDoS attack blamed for slowing down global Internet speeds - Internet | ThinkDigit News

World's biggest DDoS attack blamed for slowing down global Internet speeds - Rediff Realtime News

'Biggest Cyber Attack In History' Could Have Been Carried Out With Just A Laptop - Forbes

BBC News - Global internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'

How the world’s largest cyberattack slows down your Internet use | PCWorld

 

[mmadhankumar]

Cyber attack targeting European spam-fighting group 'originated in Russia', says expert​

A massive cyber attack targeting a European spam-fighting group that slowed some global Internet traffic have been launched by a gang of hackers from Russia and neighboring countries, an expert has said.

The head of a Russian firm specializing in defending against such attacks, Alexander Lyamin, said the same group that caused trouble around the world with its attack against the non-profit Spamhaus Project Ltd. had earlier launched a series of brief strikes on several top Russian Internet companies as a trial run of their weapon known as a Domain Name System amplification attack.

Lyamin, of Moscow's Highload Labs, said that they first noticed incidents utilizing this technique a month-and-a-half ago in Russia, the Wall Street Journal reports.

It started with a measly 10 to 20 gigabytes per second, but during the next month it grew to 60 and then 120 gigabytes, he said.

Apparently the attackers were growing their network of hacked servers, he added.

According to the paper, the attacks against Spamhaus began on March 19 and appeared to have subsided on Wednesday.

Some experts said the attack grew to as large as 300 gigabytes per second, which would make it the largest ever seen, although others, including Lyamin, dispute that

Lyamin didn't name the Russian companies that were the earlier targets because of "the very sensitive nature of this matter," but said they included services used by Russians every single day.


Cyber attack targeting European spam-fighting group 'originated in Russia', says expert - Sci/Tech - DNA