Visitors Now: | |
Total Visits: | |
Total Stories: |
Story Views | |
Now: | |
Last Hour: | |
Last 24 Hours: | |
Total: |
The Truth Behind The News
Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
March 28, 2013
Perpetrated by a group of angry hackers, the Spamhaus Project has become the target an internet wide distributed denial of service (DDoS) operation has slowed to flow of information on the web, impeding operations for average websites across the digital highway.
When Spamhaus added CyberBunker to their blacklist for websites, the spam-fighting group was hit with DDoS attacks overloading their server. Spamhaus polices the internet searching for spam to outlaw. They abuse loopholes and take totalitarian measures for security by collecting massive catalogues of spam.
However, Spamhaus is directly responsible for adverts from Viagra coming into inboxes while simultaneously blacklisting other websites as directed from “customers”.
John Reid, a spokesman for Spamhaus, said: “The size of the attack hurt some very large networks and Internet exchange points such as the London Internet Exchange. It could be thousands, it could be millions. Due to our global infrastructure, the attackers target places all over the world.”
CyberBunker offers Web-hosting to sites across the web; discriminating against child porn sites and those advocating terrorism. They allegedly operate out of an abandoned NATO bunker. They state that they are “the only true independent hosting provider in the world” while allowing their customers to host anonymously.
In 1965, the NATO facility was home to a “radio base band relay station and for local espionage and counter-espionage.” Behind the façade are “tunnels and operations rooms on four levels, one above ground designed as a decontamination area and three underground, with five-meter-thick reinforced concrete outer walls.”
Spamhaus claims CyberBunker is working with hackers from Russia and Eastern European criminals to create this all-out DDoS and disrupt the internet. The claim is that CyberBunker was facilitating 2 million spamers to flood inboxes and without Spamhaus, these “criminals” would continue harassing internet users.
CyberBunker proudly states that they have had their share of law enforcement confrontations. They said: “The Dutch authorities and the police have made several attempts to enter the bunker by force. None of these attempts were successful.”
Sven Olaf Kamphuis, current operator of the CyberBunker explained: “We are aware that this is one of the largest DDoS attacks the world had publicly seen.” He claimed that Cyberbunker is “retaliating against Spamhaus for ‘abusing their influence’. Nobody ever deputized Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the Internet. They worked themselves into that position by pretending to fight spam.”
According to Spamhaus they innocently do the biding of their customers who request that they put certain websites on blacklists.
Kaspersky Lab warns that this is just one of many attacks the public can expect throughout 2013. DDoS floods the server with too many domain requests for information, tricks the internal security and forces the server offline.
The magnitude of this DDoS has never before been seen, with a stream of 300 gb of information being transferred per second.
Spanmhaus is a consortium of hackers that are upset for being black-listed by a spam fighter.
CloudFare, a security firm, has also confirmed Kaspersky’s claim. Matthew Price, CEO of Cloudfare explains: “We have been told by one major Tier 1 provider that they saw more than 300Gbps of attack traffic related to this attack. That would make this attack one of the largest ever reported.”
CloudFare was hired by Spamhaus to combat the DDoS attacks “and we immediately mitigated the attack, making the site once again reachable.”
In an updated posting, CloudFare said: “While we don’t have direct visibility into the traffic loads they saw, we have been told by one major Tier 1 provider that they saw more than 300Gbps of attack traffic related to this attack. That would make this attack one of the largest ever reported.”
Millions of websites are being affected. Internet businesses and smaller outfits are down for undetermined hours because of this cyberattack.
These attacks have been ongoing since March 15th and has employed to assistance of Google to absorb some of the traffic to alleviate the problem.
International cyber-policing authorities have also been added to the investigation. Internet infrastructure is at stake, according to ‘experts” because Spamhaus has 80 servers across the globe.
RIk Ferguson, senior analyst for Trend Micro said: “[The DDoS attacks] would take down most Fortune 500 companies. It would even take some countries offline.
It’s a big, big attack, which is why it’s had repercussions across the rest of the web. I think of an attack bigger than this. It’s like congested roads.
Congested roads can have effects way beyond where the initial accident took place, particularly in a very connected city.”
Cyberattacks have been coming in droves in the UK, keeping the British Fusion Cell staffed with computer experts, providing and extracting information from private sector corporations under the Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership (CISP). Fusion Cells work directly with MI5, GCHQ and MI6 to thwart cyberattacks and oversee activities in cyberspace.
The CISP was borne out of the Cyber Crime Reduction Partnership Initiative (CCRPI) which utilizes investigative inquiries, academia and private –sector corporations to combat cybercrimes.
According to sources, this initiative brings the intelligence communities and commercial corporations together for surveillance over internet users. “We are still seeing the volume of attacks increasing and we expect that to continue. The Fusion Cell will allow us to geographically plot where the attacks are going and which sectors are being attacked.”
Security firm McAfee welcomed CISP as an addition to their relationships between the British government and corporate interests under the guise of cybersecurity protection.
Graeme Stewart, director of public sector strategy for McAfee said: “McAfee is broadly supportive of such initiatives. We would, however, like to see the scheme provide outreach to include smaller and SMB organizations. This sector makes up the supply chains of large corporate and government organizations and therefore a substantial portion of their risk comes from this supply chain failing to understand the threat posed by nefarious cyber activity.”
The post The Largest DDoS Attack in History Slows Internet & Takes Down Websites appeared first on Susanne Posel.