here are exceprts from several articles:

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.

from the BBC -

Continue reading the main story

Yeah, We Broke the Internet

What is becoming clear is that the attack is an outgrowth of a little-known, but highly explosive war between two factions: on one side are the Internet service providers (ISPs) and Web hosts that don’t ask their clients too many questions about whether they are hosting spam and other kinds of malicious code; on the other are groups that try to name and shame the spammers, and stop them from infiltrating your inbox—or worse, your bank’s servers. This side is engaged in a massive game of virtual whack-a-mole, only one with no end in sight.

In this latest retaliatory attack, the spammers got the better of their opponents, shutting down servers and slowing down the entire Internet. One man so far has come forward, claiming to be the spokesman for the attackers—a man named Sven Olaf Kamphuis. A so-called Internet activist, Kamphuis disdains government regulation of the Internet and, at least according to his Facebook page, gays and Jews. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Kamphuis said he owns an ISP that was put on a blacklist by the Geneva-based anti-spam company Spamhaus. Companies on the blacklist are blocked by email providers and other Internet service companies, which means they’re essentially kicked off the Internet.

So Kamphuis and others on the blacklist formed an opposition group, Stophaus, and earlier this month, they launched the most powerful “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack in the history of the Internet. DDoS attacks flood a server with data—in this case, 300 billion bits of data per second—at a rate it can’t possibly handle, thereby shutting it down. Stophaus’s onslaught overwhelmed not just Spamhaus’s servers, but the rest of the Internet, too. Thus, Netflix users around the world were suddenly wondering why they couldn’t stream You’ve Got Mail.

“There are a lot of people who are really pissed off about this,” Kamphuis said of Spamhaus. “And we are the first to show some balls and do something about it.”

from the Daily Beast, Eli Lake on the Web’s weirdest war.

also, there are more reports, links, and a video from RT, at

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