Very few doubt the importance of the internet for business, communication and well, you name it.
Along with the progress come the criminals and those seeking to do business by stealing the goods of others and selling them more cheaply or even for “free” along with malware as a bonus offering.
So, many folks have had it and are fed up to the gills with large firms which maintain servers known to be spam warehouses (and ripped stuff as well).
This is the setting for the cyber war which slowed Europe’s internet (and since it’s all connected, to a lesser degree elsewhere).
Cyberbunker is a “controversial” web host company in Holland. They are quite “zealous” in “protecting” their customers’ “rights” by blocking those who distribute “terrorist related material” or “illicit images of children”. No argument from me… certainly about the latter. However, I can't find any exact definitions or examples of what they consider "over the boundary". Could be a case of "I can't define it but know it when I see it." at least regarding the former. I don't even wish to consider the latter.
Spamhaus recently blocked traffic from Cyberbunker. The grounds? It was allowing its servers to mass spam. Of course, Cyberbunker claimed free speech violation (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21954636). Hmmm. The refuge of villains, or are they right?
So, for several days, allegedly someone acting on the behalf of Cyberbunker attacked Spamhaus’s servers using DDoS attacks… supposedly with bogus traffic reaching 300GB/sec (six times the size used on banking and governmental sites). The prior “Guinness record” was 100 GB/sec (for stats fans), supposedly. This represents a serious escalation of "hostilities".
Supposedly, this caused slow downs and jams of up to 40%. Others dispute this.
“One expert said that 300 gigabits per second is a huge amount of traffic for a single website to handle, but this has virtually no impact on the wider Internet.” - http://www.infopackets.com/news/security/2013/20130329_internet_spam_feud_results_in_huge_ddos_attack.htm
Apparently these two operations have a long history of "not liking" each other.
So, any folks in Europe notice Internet slowing?
Does anyone have an opinion? Does anyone have a "right" to inconvenience others this way (if they actually did)?
Read more here: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/when-spammers-go-to-war-behind-the-spamhaus-ddos/