Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Spamhaus Hit With 'Largest Publicly Announced DDoS Attack' Ever, Affecting Internet Users Worldwide

LONDON (AP) -- An Internet watchdog group responsible for keeping ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills out of inboxes around the world has been hit by a huge cyberattack, a crushing electronic onslaught that one expert said had already had ripple effects across the Web.

Spam-fighting organization Spamhaus said Wednesday that it had been buffeted by a massive denial-of-service attack since mid-March, apparently from groups angry at being blacklisted by the Geneva-based group.

The BBC identifies one of those blacklisted groups as Cyberbunker, a a web hosting company in the Netherlands. Cyberbunker "offers dedicated server hosting that allow clients to stay online, no matter what," according to its website.

"It is a small miracle that we're still online," Spamhaus researcher Vincent Hanna said in an interview.

Denial-of-service attacks work by overwhelming target servers with traffic - like hundreds of letters being jammed through a mail slot at the same time. In a blog post, San Francisco-based CloudFlare, Inc. said the attackers were taking advantage of weaknesses in the Internet's infrastructure to trick servers from across the Internet into routing billions of bits of junk traffic to Spamhaus every second.

The attack could be bad news for email users, many of whose incoming messages are checked against Spamhaus's widely used and constantly updated blacklists.

Hanna said that his site had so far managed to stay on top of the spammers, but warned that being knocked offline could give them an opening to step up their mailings.

The sheer size of the attack has already affected Internet users elsewhere, according to Patrick Gilmore of Akamai Technologies.

He explained that colleagues at other Internet service providers had been in touch to say their services were affected by the attack. He declined to identify them - saying they had shared the information on a confidential basis - but said problems include sluggish access and dropped connections.

He added to the New York Times: "It is the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet."

Original Article
Source: huffingtonpost.com
Author: RAPHAEL SATTER

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