Not really: Spam attack didn't slow down the 'whole' Internet

Reports of one of the ’largest ever’ cyber attacks slowing global internet services, could be greatly exaggerated.

The disruption occured when Spamhaus, a London and Geneva-based non-profit group which helps weed out unsolicited “spam” messages for email providers, said it had been subjected to “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks on an unprecedented scale for more than a week.

[caption id=“attachment_677276” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The Internet disruption was largely felt in Western Europe: Reuters[/caption]

“Based on the reported scale of the attack, which was evaluated at 300 Gigabits per second, we can confirm that this is one of the largest DDoS operations to date,” online security firm Kaspersky Lab said in a statement.

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Spamhaus publishes blacklists used by internet service providers (ISPs) to weed out spam in email traffic. The group is directly or indirectly responsible for filtering as much as 80 per cent of daily spam messages, according to Cloudflare, a company that said it was helping Spamhaus mitigate the attack.

“We’ve been under this cyber-attack for well over a week,” Steve Linford, chief executive of Spamhaus, told the BBC. “They are targeting every part of the internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down.”

But while the attack was undeniably massive and caused disruption in many countries, it certainly did not slow down the whole Internet.

According to thinkbroadband, an independent British information website which allows users to test their broadband speed, there appeared to be little evidence of a slowdown.

“Of course it is possible that people may be finding some services or sites they access over the Internet are performing slower than usual…but there appears to be no evidence to say that UK broadband users have been slowed down across the board,” it said on its blog.

And a report on Mercury newswebsite said the attack “largely affected Internet users in Europe and some parts of Asia”.

VentureBeat was a lot more brutal in its assessment of the situation, saying “It is onlyas we check Akamai’s global real-time web monitor that we see what the problem is: congestion is up in two general areas. Those would be the UK - where the BBC lives - and Germany/Netherlands, where a local fight is on between a controversial hosting provider, Cyberbunker, and a spam-fighting filter service, Spamhaus.Little hint to the BBC and others: Western Europe is not the world”.

CNet perhaps put it best - “while the Internet got punched in the kidneys, it turns out the Internet is the technological equivalent of Chuck Norris” (Or Rajinikanth if that’s who you prefer)

However the danger may not be over quite yet.

“There may be further disruptions on a larger scale as the attack escalates,” Kaspersky Lab said.

Bonus: If you want to know more about the attacks and how they wereorchestrated,there are some great links hereand here

With inputs from Reuters