Is it possible to experience a “traffic jam” on the anecdotal information superhighway? The simple answer, yes! I noticed it around 9 hours ago, but did not give too much thought into it, thinking that my local ISP’s underwater cable somewhere is experiencing issues as normal, but it seems that there is more than meets the eye. The Internet has apparently slowed down due to what security experts have deemed to be the biggest cyber-attack ever experienced in the short history of the Internet.
It seems that a particular row that sparked off being a spam-fighting group and hosting firm resulted in retaliation attacks that of course, affected the Internet in a negative manner, including impacting popular services such as Netflix. Experts have this albatross around their neck that it could potentially escalate to a level that disrupts banking and email systems. So far, five national cyber-police-forces are looking into these attacks.
Spamhaus has been identified as one of the two groups, as the London and Geneva based group is known to be a non-profit organisation who intends to assist email providers filter out spam and other unwanted content. They recently blocked servers maintained by Cyberbunker, a Dutch web host who claims that it has the right to host anything except child pornography and terrorism-related material. Cyberbunker saw Spamhaus as abusing its position, and this is where the tiff started, much to the detriment of everyone else. Hopefully the DDoS attacks against one another will cease so that the world can get on with our normal lives.