‘World’s largest cyber attack’

MANILA, Philippines – Is your Internet connection slower than usual? It could be a result of an ongoing cyber attack which security experts say is the biggest of its kind in the history of the Internet.  

Global Internet speeds slowed down Wednesday, March 27 as a result of the hacking that affected popular Internet services including video streaming service Netflix. Experts fear that if not stopped, the hacking could further escalate and affect critical service sectors such as banking and email. 

According to reports by the BBC, cyber-police forces from 5 countries are looking into the attacks.  

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack began on March 18 targeted at Europe-based spam-fighting group Spamhaus. The attack follows the group’s decision to include Dutch web host Cyberbunker on its list of suspected spam-hosting websites. This list is used by several e-mail providers to filter spam.  

Hackers use DDos attacks to bombard servers with huge amounts of traffic in an effort to take particular sites down. (ALSO READ: South Korea recovers from cyber attack)

Speaking to the BBC, Spamhaus CEO Steve Linford said, “This sort of attack would take down pretty much anything else,” noting that their engineers have been working round the clock for over a week to keep their servers up. 

Last week web security firm CloudFlare, contracted by Spamhaus to mitigate the attack, publicly recognized the attack on its blog, another piece was published today detailing the challenges they experienced over the past week when hackers were able to send more than 300 gigabits per second (Gbps) of attack traffic to Spamhaus servers – more than 6 times what normal hackers use. – Rappler.com

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