The DDoS That Almost Broke the Internet

The New York Times this morning published a story about the Spamhaus DDoS attack and how CloudFlare helped mitigate it and keep the site online. The Times calls the attack the largest known DDoS attack ever on the Internet. We wrote about the attack last week. At the time, it was a large attack, sending 85Gbps of traffic. Since then, the attack got much worse. Here are some of the technical details of what we've seen. Growth Spurt On Monday, March 18, 2013 Spamhaus contacted CloudFlare regarding an attack they were seeing against their website spamhaus.org. They signed up for CloudFlare...

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Spamhaus’ attackers turned DNS into a weapon of mass destruction

A little more than a year ago, details emerged about an effort by some members of the hacktivist group Anonymous to build a new weapon to replace their aging denial-of-service arsenal. The new weapon would use the Internet's Domain Name Service as a force-multiplier to bring the servers of those who offended the group to their metaphorical knees. Around the same time, an alleged plan for an Anonymous operation, "Operation Global Blackout" (later dismissed by some security experts and Anonymous members as a "massive troll"), sought to use the DNS service against the very core of the...

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DDoS attack against Spamhaus later targeted Tier 1 providers

IDG News Service - A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack of unprecedented scale that targeted an international spam-fighting organization last week ended up causing problems for Internet users around the world, experts say. The DDoS attack started more than a week ago and targeted the Spamhaus Project, an organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, and London that maintains databases of IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, domain names and other Internet resources involved in spam,...

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Spamhaus attacks expose huge open DNS server dangers

Massive distributed denial-of-service attacks on Spamhaus this week focused widespread attention on the huge security threats posed by millions of poorly configured Internet Domain Name System (DNS) servers. The attacks on Spamhaus that began March 19 were apparently launched by a group opposed to the Geneva, Switzerland-based volunteer organization's antispam work. Several security firms described the attacks on the organization as the largest -- by far -- ever publicly known DDoS attacks...

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The OSI Reference Model In brief

One of the greatest functions of the OSI specifications is to assist in data transfer between disparatehosts—meaning, for example, that they enable us to transfer data between a Unix hostand a PC or a Mac.The OSI isn’t a physical model, though. Rather, it’s a set of guidelines that applicationdevelopers can use to create and implement applications that run on a network. It also providesa framework for creating and implementing networking standards, devices, and internetworkingschemes.The OSI has...

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