Biggest Cyber Attack Slows Down Internet

Ever heard about experts predicting that future wars will take place online, and not in the physical world? This has truly become reality, as shown by the ongoing online war between Spamhaus, an anti-spam group, and Cyberbunker, a Dutch web hosting company. 

Cyberbunker, along with the help of some hackers, have launched a large-scale DDOS against Spamhaus. According to Steve Linford(Chief Executive,Spamhaus) they have been "unprecedented. These attacks are peaking at 300 gb/s (gigabits per second). Normally when there are attacks against major banks, we're talking about 50 gb/s." (Credit:BBC) Although Spamhaus has one of the largest DNS servers around, amplified DDOS attacks can cause huge outages and damages. The worst thing is that this will not only affect Spamhaus, but the millions of internet users across the world.

DDOS attacks happen when organizations send out server requests from thousands of computers across the world, and these requests will have the victim's IP as a source address. When the server returns huge packets of data to the victim, the victim's infrastructure will be crippled by the amount of data packets that it is unable to cope with. This will also affect individuals in various regions, as the size of data requests being sent back and forth will cripple DNS servers which are used by individuals.

Since most of the attack is being done in Europe, only internet users in that continent have noticed some lag in their internet speeds. So far, an organization called CloudFlare has helped Spamhaus to divert a lot of the web traffic and distribute the load of the requests that are coming in. While this attack is not likely to slow down DNS servers located in Asia, it is definitely a sign that cyber crime attacks can cause economic and social problems.