Spamhaus sure seems to be in the news a lot lately. Or at least, I'm mentioning them on my blog an awful lot lately.
The latest coverage concerns a rather large DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against Spamhaus, which effectively pushed bits of their infrastructure offline for a time, as the internet connections linking to this infrastructure were flooded with garbage traffic.
The internet didn't die, and I wasn't kept from streaming Netflix. But, clearly, there was some time when Spamhaus' website was offline, and according to commenters on Laura Atkins' Word to the Wise blog, they were slow in responding to queries and delisting requests.
Incidentally, I'm a big fan of Gawker and Gizmodo, so I was bummed to see the Gizmodo article got some important facts wrong. I'll leave which facts as an exercise for the reader. And if you like a good (crazy) conspiracy theory, John C. Dvorak pulls a good one right out of his nose and flicks it onto the page for all to read. His fantastic scientific testing methodology apparently includes measuring a DDoS through comparison of load times of two single internet web pages, and a picture of Julian Assange confuses him into thinking that he's found the secret, true cyber-home of Wikileaks (he hasn't).
Spamhaus sure seems to be in the news a lot lately. Or at least, I'm mentioning them on my blog an awful lot lately.
The latest coverage concerns a rather large DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against Spamhaus, which effectively pushed bits of their infrastructure offline for a time, as the internet connections linking to this infrastructure were flooded with garbage traffic.
Gizmodo claims that it didn't happen. Spamhaus and Cloudflare both disagree. It even got coverage in the New York Times and on CNet. Laura Atkins' linked to a more reasonable (less sensational) bit of explanation published by the Internet Storm Center. (If you only click through to one of these links, that's the one to read.)
The internet didn't die, and I wasn't kept from streaming Netflix. But, clearly, there was some time when Spamhaus' website was offline, and according to commenters on Laura Atkins' Word to the Wise blog, they were slow in responding to queries and delisting requests.
Incidentally, I'm a big fan of Gawker and Gizmodo, so I was bummed to see the Gizmodo article got some important facts wrong. I'll leave which facts as an exercise for the reader. And if you like a good (crazy) conspiracy theory, John C. Dvorak pulls a good one right out of his nose and flicks it onto the page for all to read. His fantastic scientific testing methodology apparently includes measuring a DDoS through comparison of load times of two single internet web pages, and a picture of Julian Assange confuses him into thinking that he's found the secret, true cyber-home of Wikileaks (he hasn't).
Comments
Post a Comment
Comments policy: Al is always right. Kidding, mostly. Be polite, please and thank you.