The ‘biggest’ cyber attack
In what is being described by experts as one of the biggest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in Internet history, a cyber attack originally targeting a single company has now blown so much out of proportion, that it has been dragging down Internet speeds in Europe.
And if this doesn’t stop, it can spread to other parts of the globe too. So what exactly makes this type of attack different from all other attacks we have seen in the past?
The attacks originally targeted a European anti-spam company called Spamhaus, which blacklists what it considers sources of email spam and sells those blacklists to Internet Service Providers. Waves of large but typical DDoS assaults began early last week, shortly after Spamhaus blacklisted Cyberbunker, a controversial Dutch web hosting company. For a DDoS attack, hackers use tons of computers, usually ones infected with malware, to send random traffic at a particular server with the intention of overloading it. The attacks have evolved into a complex beast, pointing up to 300 gigabits per second at an expanding list of targets.
Hackers even went one step further by exploiting a known fault in the Domain Name System (DNS), a key piece of Internet infrastructure.
Cyberbunker has not directly taken responsibility for the attacks against Spamhaus.
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