THE world's biggest cyber attack is underway, with collateral damage spilling over to home users as major powers such as Google step in.
Internet spam filter Spamhaus, which 'black-lists' service providers suspected of offering refuge for spammers, is the target of the unprecedented attack. One expert warns that the side-effects of the electronic onslaught - 'the biggest attack in history' - was now affecting others across the internet.
If the Spamhaus service was to collapse, email users could expect an influx of email adverts in their inboxes for fake Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills.
The BBC reports major companies, such as Netflix, have been affected by the attack and that key players such as Google have now stepped in to help keep Spamhaus online.
Patrick Gilmore of Akamai Technologies said the attack was so large that online bystanders had been hit as well. Home users could experience slower internet or be subjected to unwanted emails.
In an interview, Spamhaus' Vincent Hanna said his site had been hit by a crushing wave of denial-of-service attacks and that it was "a small miracle that we're still online."
Denial-of-service attacks are where attackers target a particular website server with an overwhelming amount of traffic - like hundreds of letters being jammed through a mail slot at the same time. However, there is often a spill-over effect where other key internet servers get 'clogged up'.
The attack's perpetrators had taken advantage of weaknesses in the Internet's infrastructure to trick thousands of servers into routing a torrent of junk traffic to Spamhaus every second.
This attack has involved traffic of up to 300 billion bits per second (300Gps). The previous largest attack was recorded at 100Gps, according to San Francisco-based CloudFlare Inc., which Spamhaus has enlisted to help it weather the attack.
"It was likely quite a bit more, but at some point measurement systems can't keep up,'' CloudFlare chief executive Matthew Prince wrote in an email.
Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, said the attack was large 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."
Mr Hanna said his group had been weathering such attacks since mid-March.
Five different cyber-police-forces from around the world are responding to the attack. A Dutch web host recently blacklisted by Spamhaus is being investigated, as are Russian spam servers.
A man who identified himself as Sven Olaf Kamphuis said he was in touch with the attackers and described them as mainly consisting of disgruntled Russian Internet service providers who had found themselves on Spamhaus' blacklists. There was no immediate way to verify his claim.
He accused the watchdog of arbitrarily blocking content that it did not like. Spamhaus has widely used and constantly updated blacklists of sites that send spam.
"They abuse their position not to stop spam but to exercise censorship without a court order," Kamphuis said.
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