Here in the U.S., you may not have noticed, but the internet has been a little slow this week. The reason? Several media sources are pointing to a massive distributed denial-of-service attack that took place March 19 and just ended March 26.
Here are the basics: Spamhaus, a not-for-profit anti-spam company is thought to have been targeted by Dutch company Cyberbunker after Spamhaus added Cyberbunker to a blacklist of spam sources. Spamhaus then turned to CloudFlare, a company that specializes in fighting these attacks, to help minimize the damage from the attacks. Spamhaus then started using CloudFlare’s network to avoid attacks.
However, the attackers then switched methods and used a DNS amplification attack to target CloudFlare’s internet service providers and then the providers to those providers. According to ZDNet about 30,000 DNS resolvers were involved in the attack.
And here’s the thing: this is being called the largest DDos attack the world has ever seen, but did you experience any internet slowness this week? Some articles are saying it’s only been affecting Europe, so maybe here in America, we don’t have the best perspective on it. But clearly, neither did BBC when they posted this headline: “ Global internet slows down after ‘biggest attack in history ’”. Europe is far from being the same as global.
Gizmodo can direct you to where this all started:
“Hours after the Times and BBC broke the "news" of our internet's artillery wounds, CloudFlare put up a breathless blog post entitled, subtly, "The DDoS That Almost Broke the Internet." Yikes! What follows is essentially a press release that would be like Pfizer telling you how horrible various diseases are, and how well their pills work against them.”
And whether or not you believe it’s a PR tactic or really has the potential to have a global reach, the event has pointed out just how vulnerable we can be to the evolving tactics of spammers using bigger and better techniques. Even if this hack wasn’t the one to bring down the internet, the next one might be out there yet.
via Examiner National Edition Gadgets & Tech Channel Articles http://www.examiner.com/article/dns-attack-causes-serious-but-not-global-damage-to-internet?cid=roadrunner