News related to the DDoS attack on global internet infrastructure is buzzing around indicating the slowdown of internet speeds across the globe. Affecting services majorly in Europe, this is said to be the biggest cyber-attack ever declared publicly.
Internet is an open platform to each and every individual despite of their profession and skills, to assist them in learning the subject of their interest. These services are fruitful to each class of user as it provides them an instant and easy access to information with little to no efforts. Different types of media are used in the same case to enhance the level of productivity of related information. However, the darker side of the inter-connection is that each and every terminal, located over the network gets exposed to unauthorized access.
Different types of cyber attacks can be used to disable the functionality or services of the internet, used by any machine. Some of them are listed below:
DoS or Denial of Service Attack Sniffing SQL Injection Session Hijacking etc.
The most recent example of one of the cyber-attacks listed above has been encountered by a non-profited and anti-spam company, Spamhause. An extension of DoS, which is DDoS or expanded as Distributed Denial of Service attack was targeted at the servers of this company in order to disconnect it from all the internet services. Talking about Spamhause, it's an anti-spam organization which flags the spam and bogus websites and floats the list to Internet Service Providers all over the globe. This helps ISPs to keep its users secure from malicious and infected websites and secure the perimeter of its internet infrastructure.
A DDoS attacks overwhelms the network of the target by flooding its network with a huge amount of traffic. The amount of traffic is so large that it reaches the maximum capacity of the network infrastructure of the target after which, the server of the target becomes unable to serve the request from the clients and shuts down. Same happened with Spamhause where hackers exploited DNS or domain name system, a key element in the functionality of internet, to flood the network with large number of fake requests made by the servers or BOTnets. Hackers redirected the traffic to Spamhause's network by scaling up the amount of traffic to 300 gigabytes per second .
Attackers also attacked the Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in several parts of Europe, causing congestion in the network infrastructure within the geographical region and eventually slowing down the speed of requests served in that particular region. Elaborating an IXP, it's a physical access point where an ISP exchanges traffic and connects with the network. Since the access point itself was choked in this attack, it made it difficult for the users or machines to connect and get response, eventually slowing down the traffic speed and response time.
via Examiner National Edition Gadgets & Tech Channel Articles http://www.examiner.com/article/massive-cyber-attack-slows-down-internet?cid=roadrunner