Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, told BBC that the scale of this cyberattack has 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."
The attacks have been ongoing since March 15 and are “being investigated by five different national cyber-police-forces around the world.” Companies like Google “made their resources available to help ‘absorb all of this traffic’.” Linford added, “They are targeting every part of the internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down. We can't be brought down. Spamhaus has more than 80 servers around the world. We've built the biggest DNS server around." The anti-spam group alleged that “Cyberbunker, in cooperation with ‘criminal gangs’ from Eastern Europe and Russia, is behind the attack.”
Last week, when CloudFlare first talked publicly about the DDoS attacks on Spamhaus, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince explained, “These very large attacks, which are known as Layer 3 attacks, are difficult to stop with any on-premise solution. Put simply: if you have a router with a 10Gbps port, and someone sends you 11Gbps of traffic, it doesn't matter what intelligent software you have to stop the attack because your network link is completely saturated.” CloudFlare relied on Anycast, which “means the same IP address is announced from every one of our 23 worldwide data centers. When there's an attack, Anycast serves to effectively dilute it by spreading it across our facilities.” When Spamhaus was back online, the spam-fighting group said “they were DDoS’d by Russian spam gangs.”
"Millions" of people surfing the Web might be affected by these cyberattacks that are exploiting the Domain Name System (DNS), the "Internet’s core infrastructure." It "functions like a telephone switchboard for the Internet. It translates the names of Web sites like Facebook.com or Google.com into a string of numbers that the Internet’s underlying technology can understand. Millions of computer servers around the world perform the actual translation.” Linford told the BBC, “The attack's power would be strong enough to take down government internet infrastructure.”
International Business Times added that the congestion "threatens critical infrastructure" systems.
“These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,” Prince told the New York Times. “It’s so easy to cause so much damage.” Patrick Gilmore, chief architect at Akamai Networks, added, “It is the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet.”
Regarding CyberBunker, Gilmore said, “These guys are just mad. To be frank, they got caught. They think they should be allowed to spam.”
Continue Reading at.... http://blogs.computerworld.com/cybercrime-and-hacking/21967/biggest-ddos-attack-history-slows-internet-breaks-record-300-gbps
