The ‘biggest cyber-attack in history’ has caused a worldwide web slowdown as the battle between an anti-spam group and a Dutch web host continues to heat up.
The largest known distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in history was sparked when the non-profit group Spamhaus placed CyberBunker on a real-time blacklist of sites to be blocked for spreading spam earlier this month.
The (DDoS) attacks – which flood targeted web servers with fake traffic to make them inaccessible – have reportedly caused millions to experience delays with services such as the Netflix video-streaming service and made other sites temporarily unavailable. Experts fear the web congestion could lead to banking and email system slowdowns around the world.
Spamhaus servers were at one point being inundated with 300 billion bits per second (300Gbps) of data, three times larger than the previous record attack of 100 Gbps, Darren Anstee from Arbor Networks Solutions told IBTimes UK.
Spamhaus, which helps email providers filter out spam and other questionable content, first reported the attacks on March 20.
Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, told the BBC that this scale of attack could knock down government Internet infrastructure.
“If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly,” he said.“They would be completely off the Internet.”
Linford noted that “when there are attacks against major banks, we’re talking about 50 gbs.”
