The Biggest DDoS Ever that "Almost Broke the Internet"?

“If the Internet felt a bit more sluggish for you over the last few days in Europe, this may be part of the reason why.” Well, “a bit more sluggish” for limited sets of communications in parts of Europe for a few days is not a broken internet, and is certainly not close to a critical infrastructure disaster.

There’s been a lot of attention for the recent reports regarding a DDoS attack against Spamhaus which reached a peak of 300gbps. Yes, such enormous amount of throughput definitely makes this one of the biggest DDoS attacks ever seen. DDoS attacks have seen an increase in popularity in recent times and there’s no sign they’ll go away anytime soon. Cyber-criminals, competitors, hacktivists and nation-state sponsored actors all have their motives to use DDoS attacks. In this case, a suspected entity behind these attacks is a Dutch hosting company called CyberBunker, whose owner denies being responsible, but claims to be a spokesman for the attackers. The conflict between Spamhaus and CyberBunker goes back to 2011 and has now escalated after Spamhaus blacklisted CyberBunker earlier this month. The timing and conflict is uncanny. And, Spamhaus is certainly under attack from some determined group capable of generating massive amounts of traffic, forcing them to move to hosting and service provider CloudFlare, known for effectively dissipating large DDoS attacks.

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