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Largest DDoS In History Reaches 300 Billion Bits Per Second
An anonymous reader writes "The NYT is reporting that the Largest DDoS in history reached 300 Gbps. The dispute started when the spam-fighting group Spamhaus added the Dutch company Cyberbunker to its blacklist, which is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam. Millions of ordinary Internet users have experienced delays in services like Netflix or could not reach a particular Web site for a short time. Dutch authorities and the police have made several attempts to enter the bunker by force but failed to do so. The attacks were first mentioned publicly last week by Cloudflare, an Internet security firm in Silicon Valley that was trying to defend against the attacks and as a result became a target."
The dispute started when the spam-fighting group, called Spamhaus, added the Dutch company Cyberbunker to its blacklist, which is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam.
I think what they meant to say here was: "The dispute started when the spam-fighting group Spamhaus, which maintains a blacklist used by e-mail providers to weed out spam, added the Dutch company Cyberbunker to its blacklist."
Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
The summary makes it sound like the Cyberbunker is a physical location. If so, a wire cutter should cut off it's access to the inter webs.
“These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare. “It’s so easy to cause so much damage.”
relax dude, its just spam, not nuclear warfare. shut the computer off and go outside for a couple of hours.
WARNING: if you attempt to RTFA, you will also be bombarded by a DDOS of spam ads. I appreciate the realism but it's kinda annoying.
I find it very interesting that they are using a variation on the Old Smurf attacks for this. Sending a message to other places that work as an amplifier. You would think that after 10 years we would have learned that blind, unchecked, forwarding is not a good thing.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
With an operator no doubt facilitating illegal actions of their customers, and refusing to no doubt enfore court orders to disconnect their customers for said actions, couldn't a case be made to disconnect them from THEIR upstream providers because they are now acting illegally but not following court orders, presuming that their upstream providers follow court orders, and the upstream upstream until you get to a legitimate entity. It seems quite an shortcoming of the law that they can act with impunity while allowing their customers to bring down the very fabric of the world wide web.
From TFA:
In other words: Cyberbunker is not currently under assault by police, and we have only their word that they ever have been. I suspect that at one time they were successful in having visiting cops think nobody was home by being real quiet and quickly turning off all the lights.
From TFA:
Cyberbunker brags on its Web site that it has been a frequent target of law enforcement because of its “many controversial customers.” The company claims that at one point it fended off a Dutch SWAT team.
The only mention of "Dutch authorities and police" comes from the Cyberbunker company itself. The article is badly written, so it's not completely clear (from the context) whether or this claim is related to the current dDOS the company is running. The writer doesn't appear to have talked to anyone in Holland - except perhaps the self-styled spokesman for Cyberpunker.
#DeleteChrome
Who'd they piss off?
Spamhaus must be costing somebody (or some people) a LOT of money to draw such a massive attack.
I admire their balls -- Spamhaus are fighting serious and organised criminals, people who are perfectly capable of raping and murdering folks who get in their way. It wasn't so long ago that the Russian mafia targeted a Russian security specialist by kidnapping his daughter, raping her, injecting her with heroin and selling her into slavery.
They are not very nice people at all, and shouldn't be fucked around with. Picking fights with organised criminals should be left to law enforcement.
While the bunker itself is designed to withstand a nuclear blast, the doors are the weak point.
A thermal lance can cut through the door while also able to make a nice hold in the concrete walls into which explosives of various types can be implanted.
As others have said, cut the communication and electrical lines and let them fend for themselves. They may have food and fuel, but they can't last forever.
On second thought, cut the electricity and communication, then pile tons of rubble in front of the doors to prevent them from coming out once they exhaust their supplies.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
http://bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21954636
No b/s subscription paywall nonsense
More likely some mafiosi that controls malware and spambots, and their "clients" don't like a bunch of amateurs blocking their messages.
DING DING DING
From the BBC article:
Spamhaus has alleged that Cyberbunker, in cooperation with "criminal gangs" from Eastern Europe and Russia, is behind the attack.
Well, I'd assume to be online they're probably going to have some sort of fiber-optic connection. Even if it's redundant, it's going to plug into the greater infrastructure somewhere and it shouldn't be *too* hard to sever if the police really had a mind to do so.
From TFA:
“Nobody ever deputized Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the Internet,” Mr. Kamphuis said. “They worked themselves into that position by pretending to fight spam.”
I'd rather not have to consult Spamhaus blacklists on my mail servers to block incoming email. I know that if I removed it my bandwidth would be clogged and the amount of work done by my servers to deal with spam would increase many fold. So I use Spamhaus blacklists and it makes me feel dirty. It's the wrong solution to the problem of spam. Surely we should be able to come up with something better.
Spamhaus has been going for 15 years. Look at the other technological advances in that time why don't we have an effective, agreed upon, resolution to the problem of spam? Perhaps the best thing would be for Spamhaus to shut up shop, to stop providing the DNS lists. For mail servers to stop filtering and marking the spam. Let the size of the problem manifest itself. Perhaps then we will get a concerted effort to stop it rather than mitigate the impact.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
IF its a DDOS, then losing control of the stupid little robots will not make it stop, they will just be unstoppable. If you want to prevent DDOS, then you need to force ISPs to perform egress filtering of source addresses that are outside of their network. And also implement a choke protocol to inform the ISPs that they have a bad actor on their network.
Item 1: The DDOS began after Cyberbunker IPs were added to the black lists.
Item 2: Cyberbunker have a policy saying that they won't look at your servers and don't care what you do. Pretty much a green-light for spammers.
Item 3: The internet activist stating that the DDOS is in response to the blacklisting.
The circumstantial evidence points towards the attacks as being the result of the action Spamhaus took with respect to Cyberbunker. Its unlikely to be the company themselves, but rather at the instigation of one of their customers. The interesting thing is that you can find reports from 2011 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/20/spamhaus_a2b_row/) where Spamhaus say that Cyberbunker were on the blacklist then with no prospect of being removed. What has happened in the meantime?
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
The different lists published by Spamhaus distinguish whether the IPs are directly responsible or are organizationally related. There is no abuse of power here — customers subscribe to the lists that they want, and use those lists to block as they see fit. Spamhaus isn't forcing anyone to use the lists, nor is it misrepresenting what's in the lists.
Cutting their communication lines was the first thing I thought of too. Then cutting their power lines. I may not have enough cofee in me to calm me down this morning but visions of the Dirty Dozen dumping fuel and grenades into their bunker came to mind. }:D
If Carnival Cruise Lines have taught us anything, just back up their toilets. They'll be out in a jiffy.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar