Attacks on Spamhaus Used Internet Against Itself

The New York Times reported on how Attacks on Spamhaus Used Internet Against Itself. "On Tuesday, security engineers said that an anonymous group unhappy with Spamhaus, a volunteer organization that distributes a blacklist of spammers to e-mail providers, had retaliated with a cyberattack of vast proportions.

In what is called a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack, the assailants harnessed a powerful botnet — a network of thousands of infected computers being controlled remotely — to send attack traffic first to Spamhaus’s Web site and later to the Internet servers used by CloudFlare, a Silicon Valley company that Spamhaus hired to deflect its onslaught."

Are Technica gives more details in two posts. When spammers go to war: Behind the Spamhaus DDoS explains who the parties are and what they're arguing about including some details on how some spam is blocked. How Spamhaus’ attackers turned DNS into a weapon of mass destruction explains some of the reasons this attack is different than previous ones.