When spammers go to war: Behind the Spamhaus DDoS

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/when-spammers-go-to-war-behind-the-spamhaus-ddos/

By Peter Bright
Ars Technica
Mar 28 2013

Over the last ten days, a series of massive denial-of-service attacks 
has been aimed at Spamhaus, a not-for-profit organization that describes 
its purpose as "track[ing] the Internet's spam operations and sources, 
to provide dependable realtime anti-spam protection for Internet 
networks." These attacks have grown so large—up to 300Gb/s—that the 
volume of traffic is threatening to bring down core Internet 
infrastructure.

The New York Times reported recently that the attacks came from a Dutch 
hosting company called CyberBunker (also known as cb3rob), which owns 
and operates a real military bunker and which has been targeted in the 
past by Spamhaus. The spokesman who the NYT interviewed, Sven Olaf 
Kamphuis, has since posted on his Facebook page that CyberBunker is not 
orchestrating the attacks. Kamphuis also claimed that NYT was plumping 
for sensationalism over accuracy.

Sven Olaf Kamphuis is, however, affiliated with the newly organized 
group "STOPhaus." STOPhaus claims that Spamhaus is "an offshore criminal 
network of tax circumventing self declared internet terrorists 
pretending to be 'spam' fighters" that is "attempt[ing] to control the 
internet through underhanded extortion tactics."

STOPhaus claims to have the support of "half the Russian and Chinese 
Internet industry." It wants nothing less than to put Spamhaus out of 
action, and it looks like it's not too picky about how that might be 
accomplished. And if Spamhaus won’t back down, Kamphuis has made clear 
that even more data can be thrown at the anti-spammers.

[...]

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