Internet Hit by Huge, but not Global, DDoS Attack

The DDoS attack that hit SpamHaus this week was huge, but not as global as first thought, according to Venture Beat. The Internet Traffic Report shows the response time has been “pretty steady for the past 30 days, with no discernible dip in the past week, and packet loss globally has remained steady at almost zero.”

Venture Beat also looked at the InternetPulse, which revealed that the internet in the US wasn`t affected, having a latency of less than 90 seconds in response times.

“Little hint to the BBC and others: Western Europe is not the world,” Venture Beat wrote. The Internet was slowed especially in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, where the fight between hosting provider Cyberbunker and SpamHaus began.

The problems started after the antispam organization blacklisted the provider for distributing unsolicited e-mail messages. This led Cyberbunker supporters to hit SpamHaus with 300 gigabits/second of data, at the peak of the attack against upstream providers. As a comparison, Ëœnormal` DDoS attacks against major banks run at about 50 gigabits/second.

“We saw approximately 120 Gbps hit the edge of our network,” Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, a SpamHaus host, told eSecurity Planet. “At that point, the attackers changed their strategy and started targeting our upstream providers.”

Prince also said Internet congestion was almost entirely limited to Europe and, briefly, Asia. “Whether the Internet slowed down depended on whether your packet was going through a Tier 1 provider or Internet Exchange that was affected.”