Has your internet been playing up over the past few days? No, it’s not your computer or your wireless that’s the problem. It’s all down to a fight that’s happening between an anti-spam group and a web-hosting company.
The Irish Independent reports that this fight resulted in the biggest cyber-attack in history. The attack was so massive that it’s caused a slowdown in the global internet. Crazy, right?
Internet services across the world have been experiencing disruption, with websites taking far longer to load or simply not working. The fight began when Spamhaus, a group against spam (or ‘junk mail’) online added the hosting company Cyberbunker to its blacklist.
When Spamhaus puts a company on its backlist, emails from that company are filtered away before they make it into people’s inboxes.
Cyberbunker is a web-hosting company that will host websites of ANY topic, as long as they don’t feature terrorism-related content or child pornography.
Can’t stream your favourite shows or download images? It could be due to the attack
After Spamhaus blacklisted CyberBunker, they were hit with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack – this means that their website was flooded with traffic making the website inaccessible to other users. It is believed that the cyber-attack hit Spamhaus with 300+ billion bits of data per second, making it the largest cyber-attack in history.
“If you imagine it as a motorway, attacks try and put enough traffic on there to dog up on the on and off ramps,” said Professor Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey.
“With this attack, there’s so much traffic it’s clogging up the motorway itself,” Professor Woodward added.
Sven Olaf Kamphuis, a spokesman for Cyberbunker, told the media that the attack was carried out because Spamhaus was abusing its power and should not be allowed to decide “what goes and does not go on the internet.”
As it stands, five national cyber-police-forces are investigating the attacks and it’s likely that your internet will be back up to speed again shortly.
