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"Anti-spam organization Spamhaus has been hit by a number of large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, bringing down its own website temporarily\u00A0and causing widespread disruption across the Internet.\r\n\r\nThe BBC is reporting it as the 'biggest cyber-attack in history,' with The New York Times describing it as \u2018one of the largest computer attacks on the Internet.'\r\n\r\nThe DDoS attacks are alleged to have originated from CyberBunker, a Dutch web hosting company that will store anything except child pornography and files related to terrorism. As a result, some of its clients are rumored to use the hosting service for spam, phishing sites and malware operations.\r\n\r\nIf true, this latest clash follows a long and unpleasant history between the two organizations.\r\nA tangle with A2B\r\nSpamhaus declared in October 2011 that CyberBunker was providing hosting to spammers. The non-profit contacted the Dutch Internet service provider A2B to request that it pull the parts of its service supporting CyberBunker.\r\n\r\nWhen nothing happened, Spamhaus proceeded to add A2B to its blocklist. These lists are incredibly important, as many Internet service providers use them to reduce the amount of spam messages they\u00A0receive. \u00A0At the time of writing, Spamhaus says its blocklists are protecting over 1.78 billion mailboxes across the Internet.\r\n\r\nA2B eventually dropped CyberBunker to regain support for all of its services, but allegedly filed a report with local police accusing Spamhaus of \u201Cextortion\u201D and carrying out a \u201CDoS attack\u201D on its network.\r\n\r\nA2B later responded on its website: \u201CThis is not about whom we provide transit for, this is about a shady UK ltd with virtual offices in the UK and Switzerland, that is trying to force their views upon us.\r\n\r\n\u201CIf A2B Internet would be providing transit for illegal internet activities (which we aren\u2019t), there are local laws and regulations to deal with. And we are sure the local Dutch police don\u2019t require a couple vigilantes to play judge and executioner on their behalf.\u201D\r\n\r\nCyberBunker described all of this as a &amp;quot;blackmail war&amp;quot; and is said to have moved onto a new ISP after being dropped by A2B.\r\n\r\nEarlier this year, Spamhaus added CyberBunker to one of its blocklists. At the time of writing, the website is still on the Domain Block List (DBL) and likely the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) as well.\r\nThe state of play\r\nCyberBunker is yet to issue a statement taking responsibility for the DDoS attacks, which The New York Times says has now reached \u201Cpreviously unknown magnitudes\u201D of \u201C300 billion bits per second\u201D.\r\n\r\nThe BBC has also reported that according to Spamhaus, CyberBunker and \u201Ccriminal gangs\u201D from across Eastern Europe and Russia are behind the attacks. As of yet, this link has not been proven.\r\n\r\nFive national cyber-police-forces are also said to be investigating the attacks.\r\n\r\nSpamhaus\u2019 various spam-blocking databases are used by used by the majority of email service providers, corporations, universities, governments and military networks.\r\n\r\nAt the time of writing, Spamhaus is operational and being supported by Internet security firm CloudFlare. The DDoS attacks, however, are still ongoing and affecting servers \u2018all over the world\u2019.\r\n\r\n&amp;quot;These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,\u201D \u00A0Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare reportedly said. \u201CIt\u2019s so easy to cause so much damage.\u201D\r\n\r\nThe BBC has suggested that it could be affecting widely used services such as Netflix, although the extent of this has not been verified.\u00A0TNW has reached out to both CyberBunker and Spamhaus to find out more.\r\n\r\nImage Credit:\u00A0David McNew/Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/27/spamhaus-is-battling-a-ddos-described-as-the-biggest-attack-in-history/>