Cyberbunker Unleashes "Largest DDoS Attack In History"

[Andy Chalk]

Cyberbunker Unleashes "Largest DDoS Attack In History"

A dispute between The Spamhaus Project and Cyberbunker is threatening the entire internet.

Things got unpleasant in a hurry for anti-spam organization The Spamhaus Project after it added Dutch hosting company Cyberbunker to its blacklist. CyberBunker - so named because it's housed in a 50s-era bunker - claims that it will host anything but child pornography and material related to terrorism, which is what put it on The Spamhaus Project's hit list.

Cyberbunker reportedly struck back with a DDoS attack, but on a scale that was virtually unprecedented. Spamhaus CEO Steve Linford told the BBC that the attacks are peaking at 300 Gb/s (gigabits per second), far worse than the 50 Gb/s attacks that have been used in the past to take major banks offline. He also claimed that the DDoS attack is being investigated by five different police forces from around the world, although he refused to specify which ones for fear that the attacks would be turned against them.

"We've been under this cyber-attack for well over a week," Linford said. "But we're up - they haven't been able to knock us down. Our engineers are doing an immense job keeping it up. This sort of attack would take down pretty much anything else."

CloudFlare, an internet security firm and networking service that is helping to defend against the attacks, confirmed their scale in a blog post [http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-ddos-that-almost-broke-the-internet] today. "While we don't have direct visibility into the traffic loads they saw, we have been told by one major Tier 1 provider that they saw more than 300Gbps of attack traffic related to this attack," the company wrote. "That would make this attack one of the largest ever reported."

Unfortunately, while Spamhaus is holding on, the rest of the internet is suffering. The sheer scale of the attack is having an impact on services like Netflix and could eventually affect banking, email and other systems. "Over the last few days, as these attacks have increased, we've seen congestion across several major Tier 1s, primarily in Europe where most of the attacks were concentrated, that would have affected hundreds of millions of people even as they surfed sites unrelated to Spamhaus or CloudFlare," the CloudFlare blog post explains. "If the Internet felt a bit more sluggish for you over the last few days in Europe, this may be part of the reason why."

Sources: New York Times [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21954636]


Permalink

 

[Colt47]

I'm sitting here laughing as I read the intro to this. The worst threat to the internet isn't Anonymous, it's a group living in a bunker somewhere who have literally named their company after it.

 

[UberPubert]

I'm sitting here stunned and wondering if this is real. Services across Europe might begin feeling the impact of a DDoS attack in a war between two internet organizations named spamhaus and cyberbunker?

Did I just wake up in the lamest cyberpunk setting ever?

 

[PBMcNair]

I'm sitting here stunned and wondering if this is real. Services across Europe might begin feeling the impact of a DDoS attack in a war between two internet organizations named spamhaus and cyberbunker?

Did I just wake up in the lamest cyberpunk setting ever?

I definitely picked the wrong week to replay The Nameless Mod.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nameless_Mod

And I can't be the only person who finds spamhaus an odd name for an Anti-spam group.

 

[Therumancer]

I'm sitting here laughing as I read the intro to this. The worst threat to the internet isn't Anonymous, it's a group living in a bunker somewhere who have literally named their company after it.

Well, I'm not a huge Anonymous fan as they are hardly heroes, but they are not a threat to The Internet, more of one of it's guardians in their own way as a lot of their actions, especially recently, have been aimed at companies and organizations trying to limit freedom on the internet.

This is pretty much a fight between a major spam/file sharing hub, and those trying to regulate bulk mass mailing and file sharing. It's mostly surprising because neither of these two players we usually hear a lot about, at least not in gaming/fandom circles.

From the way this sounds we, the average user, should probably actually be cheering for Cyberbunker, since they were pretty much being targeted for their free information policies, where Spamhaus was trying to put them on a blacklist presumably to try and organize IPs to prevent users from accessing their networks.

I know opinions are going to vary, and if you follow my posts I'm hardly pro-pirate, but I do not think this kind of regulation belongs on the internet at all, regardless of whether it's coming from goverment action or private companies doing the organizing.

To be honest, expect more of this in coming years since it seems like there is an unprecedented amount of effort going into trying to remove freedom from the internet.

 

[Albino Boo]

I'm sitting here laughing as I read the intro to this. The worst threat to the internet isn't Anonymous, it's a group living in a bunker somewhere who have literally named their company after it.

Well, I'm not a huge Anonymous fan as they are hardly heroes, but they are not a threat to The Internet, more of one of it's guardians in their own way as a lot of their actions, especially recently, have been aimed at companies and organizations trying to limit freedom on the internet.

This is pretty much a fight between a major spam/file sharing hub, and those trying to regulate bulk mass mailing and file sharing. It's mostly surprising because neither of these two players we usually hear a lot about, at least not in gaming/fandom circles.

From the way this sounds we, the average user, should probably actually be cheering for Cyberbunker, since they were pretty much being targeted for their free information policies, where Spamhaus was trying to put them on a blacklist presumably to try and organize IPs to prevent users from accessing their networks.

I know opinions are going to vary, and if you follow my posts I'm hardly pro-pirate, but I do not think this kind of regulation belongs on the internet at all, regardless of whether it's coming from goverment action or private companies doing the organizing.

To be honest, expect more of this in coming years since it seems like there is an unprecedented amount of effort going into trying to remove freedom from the internet.

No they are being targeted for being the source of spam . People have the freedom to chose not to have their inbox full of spam. Cyberbunker are trying to remove that freedom because they allow spam bots to be hosted on their servers, from which they make money. The only freedom that cyberbunker cares about is their freedom to get rich.

 

[faefrost]

I'm sitting here laughing as I read the intro to this. The worst threat to the internet isn't Anonymous, it's a group living in a bunker somewhere who have literally named their company after it.

Well, I'm not a huge Anonymous fan as they are hardly heroes, but they are not a threat to The Internet, more of one of it's guardians in their own way as a lot of their actions, especially recently, have been aimed at companies and organizations trying to limit freedom on the internet.

This is pretty much a fight between a major spam/file sharing hub, and those trying to regulate bulk mass mailing and file sharing. It's mostly surprising because neither of these two players we usually hear a lot about, at least not in gaming/fandom circles.

From the way this sounds we, the average user, should probably actually be cheering for Cyberbunker, since they were pretty much being targeted for their free information policies, where Spamhaus was trying to put them on a blacklist presumably to try and organize IPs to prevent users from accessing their networks.

I know opinions are going to vary, and if you follow my posts I'm hardly pro-pirate, but I do not think this kind of regulation belongs on the internet at all, regardless of whether it's coming from goverment action or private companies doing the organizing.

To be honest, expect more of this in coming years since it seems like there is an unprecedented amount of effort going into trying to remove freedom from the internet.

Spamhaus simply keeps and publishes a list of public IP's and domains that are major sources of SPAM. This list is then used by a tremendous amount of corporate and network anti spam gateways to prevent the influx of crippling spam from disrupting their networks and their business. Spamhaus did not stage an attack on Cyberbunker. They did not go on a crusade against them. They listed them on a publicly published blacklist of known spam sources. Spamhaus doesn't make anybody actually use their list, although a great deal of major ISP's do.

There were some reports of Dutch SWAT teams trying to storm the bunker and being unable to penetrate it. Any truth to that?

 

[fix-the-spade]

There were some reports of Dutch SWAT teams trying to storm the bunker and being unable to penetrate it. Any truth to that?

Doubtful, considering a SWAT team would be carrying explosives and tear gas, they probably fended off one guy from the phone company and called it a SWAT team.

Now it would be quite funny if an actual SWAT team came and pumped the bunker full of CS.

 

[gigastar]

There were some reports of Dutch SWAT teams trying to storm the bunker and being unable to penetrate it. Any truth to that?

Doubtful, considering a SWAT team would be carrying explosives and tear gas, they probably fended off one guy from the phone company and called it a SWAT team.

Now it would be quite funny if an actual SWAT team came and pumped the bunker full of CS.

I doubt your average SWAT team is equipped to breach a bunker facility, even one thats 6 decades old.

 

[uchytjes]

I always find massive DDoS attacks incredibly funny. But... 300 gb/s!? damn.

 

[Muspelheim]

There were some reports of Dutch SWAT teams trying to storm the bunker and being unable to penetrate it. Any truth to that?

Doubtful, considering a SWAT team would be carrying explosives and tear gas, they probably fended off one guy from the phone company and called it a SWAT team.

Now it would be quite funny if an actual SWAT team came and pumped the bunker full of CS.

I doubt your average SWAT team is equipped to breach a bunker facility, even one thats 6 decades old.

But then again, if they can't get the front door open, what are the odds of them going "Well, we're stumped. Carry on, citizens" and going home?

They'd probably at least get someone to watch the door until someone comes out to buy smokes or something.

 

[waj9876]

...What?

I've never heard of these people. Have they...been really quiet and discreet until now?

 

[FalloutJack]

There were some reports of Dutch SWAT teams trying to storm the bunker and being unable to penetrate it. Any truth to that?

Doubtful, considering a SWAT team would be carrying explosives and tear gas, they probably fended off one guy from the phone company and called it a SWAT team.

Now it would be quite funny if an actual SWAT team came and pumped the bunker full of CS.

I doubt your average SWAT team is equipped to breach a bunker facility, even one thats 6 decades old.

But then again, if they can't get the front door open, what are the odds of them going "Well, we're stumped. Carry on, citizens" and going home?

They'd probably at least get someone to watch the door until someone comes out to buy smokes or something.

I have a better idea. BARRACADE THEM INSIDE and cut their connection to the net for like...a month. THEN, break in and find like...one guy fidgetting out of control while wearing human remains on his head and several other dismembered corpses. They're all in a bunker, they're 'safe', but they're also walled in. The problem can be solved with a cement truck and something to cut the connection to the outside world. It's brilliant.

 

[Strazdas]

Who doesn't win here?

Freedom of speech? internet not being controled by corporations? lack of need to follow social chains?
Now, ddosing is not good there and neither is spamming, but to say that shutting down a provider that one of the few left out there still agree to host almost everything is a win win scenario is simply illogical.

 

[fix-the-spade]

I doubt your average SWAT team is equipped to breach a bunker facility, even one thats 6 decades old.

I bet if they went away and thought about it they could. Tere are plenty of weird and wonderful things Police have done to flush people out, I'm sure if it came to it they'd grab a hose pipe and start filling the place with water (or manure), which would be even funnier than tear gas.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

It's nice to know that a bunch of guys in a bunker have the ability to stage an unprecedented DDoS attack that has repercussions throughout the internet. Gives you hope for the world.

You may think I'm joking, but really. I think it's good that it takes so few resources to protect freedom of information. Although I don't know exactly what it is that Spamhaus were after. If it's some sort of...well, spam...then there's nothing glorious in defending that.

 

[CpT_x_Killsteal]

My imagination is spiraling out of control reading this. To me it's like 2 forces have been battling below the radar for decades, and now that one has finally made an unprecedented move, the war has been partially revealed.

I need to get me head outta the clouds

 

[Some_weirdGuy]

It's nice to know that a bunch of guys in a bunker have the ability to stage an unprecedented DDoS attack that has repercussions throughout the internet. Gives you hope for the world.

You may think I'm joking, but really. I think it's good that it takes so few resources to protect freedom of information. Although I don't know exactly what it is that Spamhaus were after. If it's some sort of...well, spam...then there's nothing glorious in defending that.

I think you have your 'god guys' and 'bad guys' mixed up here? Unless I'm just confusing your post.

Spamhaus are an anti-spam group. Cyberbunker is hosting a bunch of spambots. When Spamhaus listed them as a known source of spambots on their public list, Cyberbunker decide to DDoS them, evidently trying to silence or spite them for whatever reason.

Cyberbunker being able to launch such a massive DDoSing (though amusingly still having it not actually work as they wanted) isn't really something to inspire hope O-o, especially when it seems they are the ones trying to deny freedom of information by blocking up Spamhaus' site :X