Global internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'

The internet around the world has been slowed down in what security experts are describing as the biggest cyber-attack of its kind in history.

A row between a spam-fighting group and hosting firm has sparked retaliation attacks affecting the wider internet.

It is having an impact on popular services like Netflix - and experts worry it could escalate to affect banking and email systems.

Five national cyber-police-forces are investigating the attacks.

Spamhaus, a group based in both London and Geneva, is a non-profit organization that aims to help email providers filter out spam and other unwanted content.

To do this, the group maintains a number of blacklists - a database of servers known to be being used for malicious purposes.

Recently, Spamhaus blocked servers maintained by Cyberbunker, a Dutch web host that states it will host anything with the exception of child pornography or terrorism-related material.

Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who claims to be a spokesman for Cyberbunker, said, in a message, that Spamhaus was abusing its position, and should not be allowed to decide "what goes and does not go on the internet".

Spamhaus has alleged that Cyberbunker, in cooperation with "criminal gangs" from Eastern Europe and Russia, is behind the attack.

Cyberbunker has not responded to the BBC's request for comment.

'Immense job'

Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, told the BBC the scale of the attack was unprecedented.

"We've been under this cyber-attack for well over a week.

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'Decapitating the internet'

Writing exactly one year ago for the BBC, Prof Alan Woodward predicted the inherent weaknesses in the web's domain name system.

He wrote: "It is essentially the phone book for the internet. If you could prevent access to the phone book then you would effectively render the web useless."

Read Prof Woodward's full article

"But we're up - they haven't been able to knock us down. Our engineers are doing an immense job in keeping it up - this sort of attack would take down pretty much anything else."

MR Linford told the BBC that the attack was being investigated by five different national cyber-police-forces around the world.

He claimed he was unable to disclose more details because the forces were concerned that they too may suffer attacks on their own infrastructure.

The attackers have used a tactic known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which floods the intended target with large amounts of traffic in an attempt to render it unreachable.

In this case, Spamhaus's Domain Name System (DNS) servers were targeted - the infrastructure that joins domain names, such as bbc.co.uk, the website's numerical internet protocol address.

MR Linford said the attack's power would be strong enough to take down government internet infrastructure.

"If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly," he said. "They would be completely off the internet."

He added: "These attacks are peaking at 300 Gbps (gigabits per second).

"Normally when there are attacks against major banks, we're talking about 50 Gbps"

Clogged-up motorway

The knock-on effect is hurting internet services globally, said Prof Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey.

"If you imagine it as a motorway, attacks try and put enough traffic on there to clog up the on and off ramps," he told the BBC.

"With this attack, there's so much traffic it's clogging up the motorway itself."

Arbor Networks, a firm which specializes in protecting against DDoS attacks, also said it was the biggest such attack they had seen.

"The largest DDoS attack that we have witnessed prior to this was in 2010, which was 100 Gbps. Obviously the jump from 100 to 300 is pretty massive," said Dan Holden, the company's director of security research.

"There's certainly possibility for some collateral damage to other services along the way, depending on what that infrastructure looks like."

Spamhaus said it was able to cope as it has highly distributed infrastructure in a number of countries.

The group is supported by many of the world's largest internet companies who rely on it to filter unwanted material.

MR Linford told the BBC that several companies, such as Google, had made their resources available to help "absorb all of this traffic".

The attacks typically happened in intermittent bursts of high activity.

"They are targeting every part of the internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down," MR Linford said.

"Spamhaus has more than 80 servers around the world. We've built the biggest DNS server around."

Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Yourself

Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know

About Yourself

One of the best things about image lists is that it enables us to bring together some of the most fascinating items from an array of topics. Mysteries fascinate us all and this image list exposes not just ten, but thirty incredibly interesting enigmas categorized by mystery type. Add your own favorite mysteries to the comments. Each image has a small blurb explaining what it is.

10

Your stomach is smarter than you think

Your stomach has more neurons than many animals have in their actual brains; its collection of neurons is so complex, that some call it a “second brain” for humans. While other parts of the body – the palms of your hands, for instance – also have high levels of neurons, your stomach is unique in that it can effectively think for itself, meaning that you can digest food without having to think about it. Ever been nervous, irritable, or content for apparently no reason at all? Ever found yourself unable to concentrate after an enormous meal? Chances are, your stomach is partly to blame – all the more reason to eat wisely.

9

You are as hairy as a chimp

This statement might seem to be untrue as soon as you glance in the mirror (unless you suffer from hypertrichosis), but you are indeed as hairy as most other primates. Just like chimps, we have hair all over our bodies – only it’s much finer and shorter than that of our furry cousins. Per square inch of our body we have an average of 500-1000 hair follicles.

And the hairiest creature? The sea otter puts all other animals to shame, with nearly a million hairs per square inch.

8

You are a miracle

Biology teachers often begin the year by applauding their students: “Well done,” they say. “You’ve already done the hardest thing you will ever have to do.” When the students look bemused, the teacher will explain. Everybody began as a perfectly symmetrical ball of cells – yet we’ve all ended up having a front, a back, and sides. How can a spherical cell end up forming orifices as complex as eyes, ears, and nostrils? It has to flatten, twist, and push it into shape. This forms the first orifice you have – your anus. Typically, this becomes the biology teacher’s second joke: All humans start as areas – it’s just that some remain as areas for their whole lives.

7

You are a part-virus

One of the bigger surprises unearthed by the Human Genome Project was exactly how much of our DNA has been contributed by viruses. Viruses can’t reproduce on their own – so some viruses have to insert their DNA into a host cell in order to be copied. If the virus inserts itself into a sperm or egg cell, then the resulting offspring may carry the virus DNA in every one of its cells. This has happened so often in human evolution that no less than 9% of our genome is directly derived from viruses.

6

You can’t tickle yourself

…unless you have schizophrenia. Tickling is thought to be a key part of human bonding, especially between children and their parents. When we grow up, we may come to dislike being tickled – but most people never overcome the nervous twitching and laughing that comes with another person touching us in a certain way. Yet – as we all know – we can’t tickle ourselves, since our brain knows exactly what to expect. For schizophrenics, however, it isn’t so easy to recognize the touch as belonging to themselves – many will laugh just as hard from a feather guided by their own hand.

5

Your body is younger than you are

You are changing all the time. You inhale, you exhale, you eat, and you excrete. You take in molecules and expel others constantly. If you are over the age of puberty, then it is likely that not a single part of your body ever belonged to your baby self. This leads to an interesting problem, still hotly debated by philosophers: if every part of you is different today, are you still the same person you were at birth?

4

You are partially blind

Unfortunately, your eyes have a design fault: both of them have a blind spot. This blind spot is large enough to cause problems for those who lose sight in one eye. Thankfully for most of us, the fact that we have two eyes means that the blind spots go unnoticed.

3

You can count without counting

When you are presented with groups of up to four objects, you don’t need to count them to figure out how many there are. For these small groups, you have an instinctive grasp of the number of items. Members of the Piraha tribe in Brazil don’t have any numbers in their language, and so they’re unable to count – yet even the Piraha are able to comprehend numbers up to four.

2

You may have no free will

It’s often a very violent debate: are you free to make your own decisions, or are your decisions shaped by forces beyond your control? Many arguments have been put forward on both sides of the debate, but here I will focus on the experiment carried out on a patient by Benjamin Libet.

Libet, while observing the patient’s brain, told him to move his hand whenever he wished. Libet found that the brain registered a desire to move the hand, even before the man himself was aware of this desire. This suggests that we may act impulsively, without actually making a decision. It only seems to us afterwards that we did something from our own free will, since we rationalize our actions after it happens.

1

You have stripes

Many mammals have stripes: cats can have very clear lines, or patches, which develop as certain cells start expressing different genes, and then pass the variation on to other cells. Humans are no different – it is simply that our stripes are usually invisible. You can usually only see these stripes – called Blaschko’s Lines – when a disease affects one type of cell, but not a neighboring type.