16-Year School boy arrested for World's biggest cyber attack ever

16-Year-Old Teenager has been arrested over his alleged involvement in the World's biggest DDoS attacks against the Dutch anti-spam group Spamhaus.

 

The 16-year-old was detained by detectives at his home in south-west London after “significant sums of money” were found to be “flowing through his bank account”. He was also logged on to what officials say were “various virtual systems and forums” & had his computers and mobiles seized as officers worked through the night to secure potential evidence.

The March 20 attack on Spamhaus has been dubbed as the “biggest cyber attack in the history of the Internet” which saw server of the Dutch anti-spam organization being bombarded with traffic in tune of 300 billion bits per second (300Gbps).

 

A DDoS attack takes place when hackers use an army of infected computers to send traffic to a server, causing a shutdown in the process.

It's unclear what role the teenager played in the massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The boy has been released on bail until later this year. A 35-year-old Dutchman was detained and his computers, data carriers and mobile phones were seized, local media speculates that the person is none other than CyberBunker spokesman Sven Olaf Kamphuis.

 

China hit by DDoS attack causes Internet inaccessible for hours

During the weekend China's Internet was taken down by a powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the .cn domain slowed and blocked Internet access inaccessibility for hours.

Security expert clarified that China could have been perpetrated by sophisticated hackers or by a single individual. The China Internet Network Information Center [CINIC] reported that the attack began at 02:00 local time on Sunday with a peek at 04:00 that made it the largest DDoS attack the country’s networks have ever faced. The CCINIC is responsible for registering sites in the .cn domain.

Before malicious coders can launch a DDoS attack, they must infect the computers of unsuspecting users, often by tricking people into installing malware on their computers.

The China Internet Network Information Center confirmed the attack with an official statement informing internet users that it is gradually restoring web services and that will operate to improve the security level of the Internet infrastructure of the country to prevent and mitigate further attacks.

Following the translated announcement: "8 May 25 at 0:00 or so, the State DNS node Denial of Service attacks, the China Internet Network Information Center disposal, to 2 pm, the service is restored to normal, early morning 3 through the official micro notice. Morning four o'clock, the state once again under DNS node biggest ever denial of service attacks, some websites analytical affected, leading to slow or interrupt access. 

In the notice, the attack continues, national domain name resolution services have been gradually restored. Ministry of Industry and Information Technology launched the "Domain Name System Security specific contingency plans" to further the protection of national domain name resolution services. China Internet Network Information Center, the affected user apologized to launch cyber attacks on the Internet stable behavior affect condemned. China Internet Network Information Center will work with the sector to work together to continue to enhance the service capabilities."

The Wall Street Journal was the first media agency that reported the important outage, the official source of Chinese Government confirmed that its network suffered the biggest distributed denial-of-service attack ever.

It's not currently known who attacked the Chinese domain or the motivations, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince said that there is no certainty that behind the attack there is a group of hackers, he added that "it may have well been a single individual".

DDOS attack brings the Internet to its knees

The fight between a spam fighting company called "Spamhaus" and a web hosting company called "Cyberbunker" has slowed down a majority of the internet by making DNS resolving slow.

The reason behind the attack is that Spamhaus added the IP addresses of cyberbunker to its "spam" list due to Cyberbunker allowing almost any sort of content to be hosted hence also maybe the source for spam. So Cyberbunker attacked back and this attack also affected normal internet users.

The attack was possible because of the large number of vulnerable DNS servers that allow open DNS resolving.Simply put an attack exploiting this type of vulnerability makes use of the vulnerability of the DNS server to increase the intensity of the attack 100 fold.

The origins of these type of attacks goes back to the 1990's to an attack called "smurf attack"

But now the attack method has become more efficient and uses DNS amplification to flood the victim with spoofed requests which are sent to the DNS servers by using a botnet of compromised computers.The attack at its peak reached a speed of 300 Gbps making it the largest DDOS attack in history.

Cyberbunker which claims itself to be a supporter of free speech and defender against the "big bullies" seems to have now have stooped down to their level of using aggressive offensive methods that affect the normal functioning of the internet.This is not the way to go !

The people who run DNS resolvers are also equally responsible for these attacks as its their vulnerable servers that make these attacks possible, the internet community should come up with a PERMANENT solution to this problem.