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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsYeah, We Broke the Internet: The Inside Story of the Biggest Attack Ever
Its still unclear who is behind one of the biggest attacks in Internet history, one thats disrupting service for millions of users and has created an information superhighway traffic jam across the globe.
What is becoming clear is that the attack is an outgrowth of a little-known, but highly explosive war between two factions: on one side are the Internet service providers (ISPs) and Web hosts that dont ask their clients too many questions about whether they are hosting spam and other kinds of malicious code; on the other are groups that try to name and shame the spammers, and stop them from infiltrating your inboxor worse, your banks servers. This side is engaged in a massive game of virtual whack-a-mole, only one with no end in sight.
In this latest retaliatory attack, the spammers got the better of their opponents, shutting down servers and slowing down the entire Internet. One man so far has come forward, claiming to be the spokesman for the attackersa man named Sven Olaf Kamphuis. A so-called Internet activist, Kamphuis disdains government regulation of the Internet and, at least according to his Facebook page, gays and Jews. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Kamphuis said he owns an ISP that was put on a blacklist by the Geneva-based anti-spam company Spamhaus. Companies on the blacklist are blocked by email providers and other Internet service companies, which means theyre essentially kicked off the Internet.
So Kamphuis and others on the blacklist formed an opposition group, Stophaus, and earlier this month, they launched the most powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in the history of the Internet. DDoS attacks flood a server with datain this case, 300 billion bits of data per secondat a rate it cant possibly handle, thereby shutting it down. Stophauss onslaught overwhelmed not just Spamhauss servers, but the rest of the Internet, too. Thus, Netflix users around the world were suddenly wondering why they couldnt stream Youve Got Mail.
There are a lot of people who are really pissed off about this, Kamphuis said of Spamhaus. And we are the first to show some balls and do something about it.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/28/yeah-we-broke-the-internet-the-inside-story-of-the-biggest-attack-ever.html?utm_source=Newsletter+subscribers&utm_campaign=49c7813a68-JTA_Daily_Briefing_3_28_2013&utm_medium=email
denverbill
(11,489 posts)Everyone loves spam. (cue Monty Python)
And I'm sure everyone loves you for fucking up the internet to save your spam empire.