Largest Cyber-Attack In History Causes Global Internet Slowdown

If you’ve noticed that some websites have been slow recently, there’s a good reason for that. A huge distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was launched against spam-fighting organization Spamhaus. With traffic peaking at over 300Gbps, this attack has had repercussions across the world. It’s being called the biggest cyber-attack in history.

So, what provoked this attack? A Dutch web host named Cyberbunker was recently blacklisted by Spamhaus. Starting a little over a week ago, the anti-spam organization started getting hit with a large-scale DDoS. Reportedly, the attack would be more than enough to knock down even government infrastructure. Now, Spamhaus is accusing Cyberbunker of hiring Eastern European organized crime outfits to take down the blacklist servers in retaliation.

By using techniques like DNS reflection, the attackers have been slamming Spamhaus for over a week. Steve Linford, CEO of Spamhaus, says that while attacks on large banks usually see peak traffic of 50Gbps, Spamhaus is seeing peaks over six times that amount. “This is definitely huge and [Spamhaus] has an infrastructure that gets hit with this stuff all the time, so for them to have issues with it makes it that much larger,”Adam Wosotowsky, Messaging Data Architect at McAfee Labs, told ExtremeTech today.

Despite the incredible amount of traffic, Spamhaus continues to operate. By working with cloud optimization and security company CloudFlare, the service has remained up and functional, for the most part. By load-balancing the incoming traffic to 23 different data centers across the globe, the attack was effectively diluted.

So Spamhaus got hit with a big attack, but it survived. Big deal, right? Well, unfortunately all of this illicit traffic is having a damaging effect on connection speeds.Netflix, which relies on content delivery networks (CDNs) around the world, is seeing substantial slowdown thanks to the congestion caused by the attack. While the slowdown is far from universal, it is worrisome. If a single attack against an anti-spam company can throw a monkey wrench into the internet,
what would all-out cyberwar do?

We’ve covered the threat of cyber-attacks from China in the past. The United States has even been accused of attacking allies. If a large scale attack were to hit the US, be it from hacking or DDoS, entire industries could crumble. This gigantic attack is just a pissed-off web host giving some “payback” to a spam blocker. What if a terrorist organization or rogue state decided to try to take out infrastructure?
TCP/IP and DNS are resilient, but they aren’t perfect. Interrupt the internet and the first world would drop to its knees.