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Australians are yet to feel the impact of the world's largest cyber attack reverberating around the world, but the unprecedented event has highlighted the fragility of the internet.
The denial-of-service attacks first targeted Spamhaus, a Dutch firm that provides web host blacklists that help companies decide which email traffic to accept. Spamhaus blacklisted CyberBunker, a Dutch web-hosting company they accused of facilitating spam campaigns.
Denial of service attacks, or DoS, flood websites and internet addresses with millions of requests for page views, causing them to crumble. Attacks can be deployed by using botnets – networks of infected zombie computers - which distributes the origins and increases the volume of the attack, hence the term distributed denial-of-service (DDoS).
Some outlets have published interviews quoting a spokesman for CyberBunker, Sven Olaf Kamphuis, accusing Spamhaus of being a "major censorship organisation pretending to fight spam".
Clients of a blacklisted hosting company cannot send email and other traffic around the internet, effectively crippling their business. From time to time, internet service providers are wrongly blacklisted, but the issue is often corrected quickly and email flows again.
In the RT.com interview, conducted via Skype, Kamphuis claimed Spamhaus uses "mafia" tactics and blacklists anyone who does not comply with their demands. He said members of another group which he named as Stophouse.com were carrying out the attacks, not CyberBunker.
"At this moment we are not even conducting any attacks because our people from our group stopped any attack yesterday morning so if they are still under attack which I think they are because I get news feeds that they are still under attack then it's now other people attacking them," Kamphuis told RT.com. He went on to say attackers had been joined by others who also "had problems" with Spamhaus.
After an initial attack against Spamhaus last week, attackers turned their rage towards CloudFlare a company engaged by Spamhaus to mitigate the attack. CloudFlare essentially reroutes illegitimate traffic aimed at its clients, minimising the impact on them. Attackers then went upstream, attacking the networks CloudFlare connects to.
Cloudflare's chief executive Matthew Prince has detailed the attack on his blog overnight. The company advised its clients its Sydney servers had been affected overnight but were back online this morning.
Prince said the attack began last week, at first sending 85 Gbps of traffic. Since then, it has generated more than 300 Gbps of traffic – 300 gigabits of data per second. Prince suggested attackers may have a network of their own to be able to generate such a volume.
He said CloudFlare connects to a large number of networks directly and via internet exchanges. The major networks that make up the internet – such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo - connect to these same exchanges to pass traffic between each other efficiently, he said. Hence the potential impact on other users.
"When the Spamhaus attacker realised he couldn't go after CloudFlare directly, he began targeting our upstream peers and exchanges," he wrote.
Attackers also attacked the London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Hong Kong internet exchanges," Prince said adding the company then routed traffic around them.
This is why internet users in Europe and Asia have felt some of impact, with some networks experiencing response delays. It has been mainly felt in relation to email, but could affect websites hosted in those regions.
In its latest Annual Worldwide Infrastructure report, Akamai highlighted DDoS attacks as a growing threat. It said the largest attack reported in 2012 had generated 60 Gbps of traffic, similar to that experienced in 2011, and down from the peak 100Gbps in 2010.
John Ellis, enterprise security director Asia Pacific for Akamai, a company that also mitigates such attacks for customers in Australia, said this event was not only the largest, it was beyond the contingency plans of most telecommunication providers.
"By attacking the core exchanges, they are really attacking some of the fragility of the internet. The internet at the moment suffers from performance and design.
"Countries have been talking about [fixing it] for a long time; even the UN has been talking about a mandate to ensure the traffic to Tier 1 [telecommunication] providers is clean."
The denial-of-service attacks first targeted Spamhaus, a Dutch firm that provides web host blacklists that help companies decide which email traffic to accept. Spamhaus blacklisted CyberBunker, a Dutch web-hosting company they accused of facilitating spam campaigns.
Denial of service attacks, or DoS, flood websites and internet addresses with millions of requests for page views, causing them to crumble. Attacks can be deployed by using botnets – networks of infected zombie computers - which distributes the origins and increases the volume of the attack, hence the term distributed denial-of-service (DDoS).
Some outlets have published interviews quoting a spokesman for CyberBunker, Sven Olaf Kamphuis, accusing Spamhaus of being a "major censorship organisation pretending to fight spam".
Clients of a blacklisted hosting company cannot send email and other traffic around the internet, effectively crippling their business. From time to time, internet service providers are wrongly blacklisted, but the issue is often corrected quickly and email flows again.
In the RT.com interview, conducted via Skype, Kamphuis claimed Spamhaus uses "mafia" tactics and blacklists anyone who does not comply with their demands. He said members of another group which he named as Stophouse.com were carrying out the attacks, not CyberBunker.
"At this moment we are not even conducting any attacks because our people from our group stopped any attack yesterday morning so if they are still under attack which I think they are because I get news feeds that they are still under attack then it's now other people attacking them," Kamphuis told RT.com. He went on to say attackers had been joined by others who also "had problems" with Spamhaus.
After an initial attack against Spamhaus last week, attackers turned their rage towards CloudFlare a company engaged by Spamhaus to mitigate the attack. CloudFlare essentially reroutes illegitimate traffic aimed at its clients, minimising the impact on them. Attackers then went upstream, attacking the networks CloudFlare connects to.
Cloudflare's chief executive Matthew Prince has detailed the attack on his blog overnight. The company advised its clients its Sydney servers had been affected overnight but were back online this morning.
Prince said the attack began last week, at first sending 85 Gbps of traffic. Since then, it has generated more than 300 Gbps of traffic – 300 gigabits of data per second. Prince suggested attackers may have a network of their own to be able to generate such a volume.
He said CloudFlare connects to a large number of networks directly and via internet exchanges. The major networks that make up the internet – such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo - connect to these same exchanges to pass traffic between each other efficiently, he said. Hence the potential impact on other users.
"When the Spamhaus attacker realised he couldn't go after CloudFlare directly, he began targeting our upstream peers and exchanges," he wrote.
Attackers also attacked the London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Hong Kong internet exchanges," Prince said adding the company then routed traffic around them.
This is why internet users in Europe and Asia have felt some of impact, with some networks experiencing response delays. It has been mainly felt in relation to email, but could affect websites hosted in those regions.
In its latest Annual Worldwide Infrastructure report, Akamai highlighted DDoS attacks as a growing threat. It said the largest attack reported in 2012 had generated 60 Gbps of traffic, similar to that experienced in 2011, and down from the peak 100Gbps in 2010.
John Ellis, enterprise security director Asia Pacific for Akamai, a company that also mitigates such attacks for customers in Australia, said this event was not only the largest, it was beyond the contingency plans of most telecommunication providers.
"By attacking the core exchanges, they are really attacking some of the fragility of the internet. The internet at the moment suffers from performance and design.
"Countries have been talking about [fixing it] for a long time; even the UN has been talking about a mandate to ensure the traffic to Tier 1 [telecommunication] providers is clean."
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