Security experts have said that the largest cyber-attack in history has occurred as a result of a fight between a spam-fighting group and a hosting firm, according to the BBC. The attacks are being investigated by five national cyber police forces.
The anti-spam group, Spamhaus, is a non-profit based in Geneva and London. The company works to help email companies filter spam and unwanted content. The group has a number of blocklists, which is a group of servers known to be used for malicious activities.
Spamhaus blocked servers from Cyberbunker, a web hosting company that hosts anything aside from child porn or terroristic content. A reported spokesman for Cyberbunker, Sven Olaf Kamphuis, said that Spamhaus abused its position and is not allowed to decide “what goes and does not go on the internet.”
Spamhaus claims Cyberbunker is behind the attacks along with criminal gangs from Russia and Eastern Europe. The chief executive for Spamhaus, Steve Linford, said that the attack’s size is unprecedented.
“We’ve been under this cyber-attack for well over a week.”
The attacks have included a tactic called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). This is when the intended target is overrun with traffic to make it unreachable by true visitors.
“If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly,” Linford said. “They would be completely off the internet. These attacks are peaking at 300 gb/s (gigabits per second). Normally when there are attacks against major banks, we’re talking about 50 gb/s.”
Arbor Networks is a company that protests against DDoS attacks. They claim this is the largest attack they have seen.
“The largest DDoS attack that we have witnessed prior to this was in 2010, which was 100 gb/s. Obviously the jump from 100 to 300 is pretty massive,” said Dan Holden, the company’s director of security research. “There’s certainly possibility for some collateral damage to other services along the way, depending on what that infrastructure looks like.”
“They are targeting every part of the internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down,” Linford said.
“Spamhaus has more than 80 servers around the world. We’ve built the biggest DNS server around.”