A squabble between a group fighting spam and a Dutch company that hosts websites said to be sending spam has escalated into a major attack on the Internet, causing widespread congestion and jamming crucial infrastructure around the world, The New York Times reported.
Millions of ordinary Internet users have experienced delays in services like Netflix or could not reach a particular website for a short time.
For the Internet engineers who run the global network, however, the problem is more worrisome. The attacks are becoming increasingly powerful and computer security experts worry that if they continue to escalate people may not be able to reach basic Internet services, like e-mail and online banking.
The dispute started when the spam-fighting group, called Spamhaus, added the Dutch company Cyberbunker to its blacklist, which is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam. Cyberbunker, named for its headquarters, a five-storey former NATO bunker, offers hosting services to any website “except child porn and anything related to terrorism,” according to its website.
A spokesman for Spamhaus, which is based in Europe, said the attacks began on March 19, but had not stopped the group from distributing its blacklist.
Patrick Gilmore, chief architect at Akamai Networks, a digital content provider, said Spamhaus's role was to generate a list of Internet spammers.
Of Cyberbunker, he added: “These guys are just mad. To be frank, they got caught. They think they should be allowed to spam.”
Gilmore said the attacks, which are generated by swarms of computers called botnets, concentrate data streams that are larger than the Internet connections of entire countries. He likened the technique, which uses a long-known flaw in the Internet's basic plumbing, to using a machine gun to spray an entire crowd when the intent is to kill one person.
The attacks were first mentioned publicly last week by CloudFlare, an Internet security firm in Silicon Valley that was trying to defend against the attacks and as a result became a target.
The so-called distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks have reached previously unknown magnitudes, growing to a data stream of 300 billion bits per second.
“It is a real number,” Gilmore said. “It is the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet.”
Spamhaus, one of the most prominent groups tracking spammers on the Internet, uses volunteers to identify spammers and has been described as an online vigilante group.
In the past, blacklisted sites have retaliated against Spamhaus with denial-of-service attacks, in which they flood Spamhaus with traffic requests from personal computers until its servers become unreachable. But in recent weeks, the attackers hit back with a far more powerful strike that exploited the Internet's core infrastructure, called the Domain Name System, or DNS.
That system functions like a telephone switchboard for the Internet. It translates the names of websites like Facebook.com or Google.com into a string of numbers that the Internet's underlying technology can understand. Millions of computer servers around the world perform the actual translation.
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