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| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| 'Bazooka' attacks slowing Internet: security experts |
| 2013-03-29 |
| [Dawn] A "bazooka" cyber attack described as the most powerful ever seen has slowed traffic on the Internet, security experts said on Wednesday, raising fresh concerns over online security. The attacks targeted Spamhaus, a Geneva-based volunteer group that publishes spam blacklists used by networks to filter out unwanted email, and led to cyberspace congestion that may have affected the Internet overall, according to Matthew Prince of the US security firm CloudFlare. The attacks began last week, according to Spamhaus, after it placed on its blacklist the Dutch-based Web hosting site Cyberbunker, which claimed it was unfairly labeled as a haven for cybercrime and spam. The origin of the attacks has not yet been identified. But a BBC report said Spamhaus alleged that Cyberbunker, in cooperation with "criminal gangs" from Eastern Europe and Russia, was behind the attack. The New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... quoted Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who claimed to be a front man for the attackers, as saying that Cyberbunker was retaliating against Spamhaus for "abusing their influence." But Kamphuis told the Russian news site RT that Cyberbunker was just one of several Web firms involved, protesting what he called Spamhaus's bullying tactics. "Spamhaus have pissed off a whole lot of people over the past few years by blackmailing ISPs and carriers into disconnecting clients without court orders or legal process whatsoever," he said. "At this moment, we are not even conducting any attacks... it's now other people attacking them." CloudFlare, which was called for assistance by Spamhaus, said the attackers changed tactics after the first layer of protection was implemented last week. "Rather than attacking our customers directly, they started going after the network providers CloudFlare uses for bandwidth," Prince said. "Once the attackers realized they couldn't knock CloudFlare itself offline... they went after our direct peers." |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #3 How dare they gum up the works. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2013-03-29 14:25 |
| #2 Learning lessons from the ROP, I see: "How dare you call us hackers and criminals! Why, we'll hack you and victimize you for that!" |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2013-03-29 11:32 |
| #1 Must be nice to "bazooka" an asshole, while the rest of us have to don the ol' knee pads and beg to be let off the hook. |
| Posted by: badanov 2013-03-29 08:45 |
