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AUTHOR Robert Gillespie
April 03, 2013

The Biggest Ever Internet Attack

In the past few weeks the internet has been subject to the biggest cyber-attack in history. A row surfaced some time back between a spam blocking company known as Spamhaus and a hosting firm named Cyberbunker. The row was caused when Spamhaus blocked several of the Cyberbunkers online servers considering them “spam” and almost as if a declaration of war Sven Olaf Khampuis spokesman for Cyberbunker has made a statement saying Spamhaus shouldn’t decide “what does and does not go on the internet”. This has caused massive revolt resulting in the biggest ever internet attack in history.

Five national cyber police forces are investigating the attacks in fear that the row could escalate through to the banking and email systems. The target of the attacks was Spamhaus’s Domain Names Systems (DNS) which is the server that joins domain names; the attack type is something called a DDoS or rather Distributed Denial of Service most likely one of the most common types of attacks across the internet.

what Makes This Attack So Much Different Then?

Most websites have protection against DDoS attacks or at least most major ones do, the protection is able to withstand a certain amount of Gigabites per second (Gbps) and for an example usually email and internet servers have a DDoS protection of around 50Gbps which is usually more than any attack and is at the higher end of the protection scale.

The attack recently launched is peaking at 300Gbps almost 6x the usual high amount of defence, claimed to be able to take down government internet infrastructure. Yet surprisingly somehow Spamhaus are coping with the scale of the attack however it is coming at a cost with massively slowing down the internet on a worldwide scale as the DDoS attacks are clogging up most of the capable amount of traffic.

Spamhaus are the biggest DNS server around, if there defences are breached it could spell tragedy across the internet with billions of sites being affected and potentially brought down, if the attack continues the question is how long can Spamhaus’s defences last?

Having worked in the car rental industry for over 15 years, he really knows his stuff. Rob heads up our marketing department and as a keen traveller, always has a new location to talk about. Particularly if there is a golf course nearby.

Robert Gillespie

Traveller

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