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.

 

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.