If your internet connection has been slowing down this past week, it might be because you're under attack from a mob organization. Seriously. The Dutch web-hosting site Cyberbunker has been linked to Eastern European crime syndicates in the largest cyber-attack in history, one that threatens to break the internet altogether.
The attack is in retaliation to Cyberbunker being blacklisted by the anti-spam service Spamhaus. Cyberbunker is an "anything goes" web-hosting site that will allow just about anything except for terrorist material and child pornography. Spamhaus serves over 1.7 billion people by weeding out spam material in their e-mail's inbox.
Cyberbunker initiated the attack through what is known as a DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service. For those not technologically savvy, it means that Cyberbunker began sending high volumes of traffic to Spamhaus's servers in an attempt to overcrowd them and make it impossible for normal users to get through.
"It is a small miracle that we're still online," Spamhaus researcher Vincent Hanna said.
Cyberbunker first started it's attack sometime about two weeks ago. Realizing it was under attack, Spamhaus switched over to the network of Cloudflare, a service for connecting to the internet 'cloud.' This was able to temporarily slow down the effectiveness of attacks, but not for long.
Realizing that its attacks were becoming ineffective, Cyberbunker moved up the chain of command by attacking Cloudflare's suppliers, thus creating a backlog of traffic that would eventually reach Spamhaus. This attack in turn has led to the largest cyber-attack in history.
Now, Cloudflare buys its bandwidth from what are known as Tier 2 providers, who in turn get their bandwidth from Tier 1 providers. These Tier 1 providers have already reported traffic in excess of 300Gbps, an amount that has already caused internet congestion and a slowing of the internet. If a Tier 1 fails, the whole internet is liable to break.
Perhaps what makes this story most spectacular is that Cyberbunker has reportedly been working with crime syndicates in Eastern Europe and Russia to carry out the attacks. Furthermore, they have been performing said attacks from server system which is located in nuclear fallout bunker. The bunker is so well secured that a Dutch SWAT team has allegedly been unable to break in.
The cyber-attacks are still ongoing, and until someone takes out Cyberbunker, the threat of an internet collapse is looming over everyone's heads. With a rogue internet web host sending out vindictive cyber-attacks from a nuclear bunker with the aid of a mob organization, all of which threatens to crumble the very fabric of the internet, I think it's safe to say your computer has front row seats to a warzone currently.
© 2017 Jobs & Hire All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
