Cyber attack that targeted a European organization fighting against spam is one of the most important so far, security experts have warned, one of them pointing out that the attack affected the global Internet network operation.
Cyber pirates attacked Spamhaus, a Geneva-based organization that published a blacklist of servers that are used for spam. The attack overloaded the global network, which had repercussions on global Internet services, according to Matthew Prince from the American computer security company CloudFlare.
Spamhaus demanded immediate assistance from CloudFlare to protect itself against this attack whose origin remains unknown. Prince said that computer attacks, in which sites are bombarded with a huge amount of traffic to prevent their operation is one of the biggest ever recorded.
“The cyber attack is really important,” admitted Johannes Ullrich at the U.S. SANS Technology Institute, noting that it is 10 times more powerful than similar attacks in the past. He added that he can’t give any assurance that the Internet will not be affected at a global scale.
What is a DDoS attack?
DDoS attack is a coordinated attrack, with a significant number of infected computers initiating connections on one or more servers in order to achieve their maximum processing capacity and keep them unavailable for a period of time. During this period, the legitimate users attempting to access resources can not be served. These attacks rely on sending a huge amount of information to the servers attacked. In SpamHaus case it was estimated at over 300 gigabytes per second.
DDoS attacks not only crowded the targeted servers, but slowed down the networks leading to the target data. Depending on the location of the user, the effects may or may not be triggered.
An attack of this magnitude would lead to an immediate collapse of a regular service, which demonstrates the fragility of the Internet and points out that that attackers can trigger an attack on critical infrastructure if they have the necessary resources. The easiest way to combat DDoS attacks is prevention itself. In order to start such a flow of data, the attackers need millions of computers that belong to legitimate users who were infected to provide remote unauthorized access. By running an antivirus program the users could prevent the infection of their computers, therefore attackers will not have the resources necessary to take down the targeted servers.
SpamHaus services are used by millions of customers from companies that offer e-mail services, corporate users that use SpamHaus lists for their own mail servers, to government and military service. Taking down SpamHaus causes delays in the delivery of e-mail messages and may increase the number of spam messages that would normally be blocked by SpamHaus.
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