Internet DNS access

[Gulfstreamaviator]

According to the BBC web site, there is a major slowdown, and blocking of the major DNS server provider.

Whats happening to the world....


glf

[mixture]

General media journalists don't know how to write tech articles, that's what's going on with the world.

Usual media overhyping.

Yes there was a DDoS attack. Yes it was a big one. No it did not affect the entire internet. End of story.

[green granite]

Seems clear enough to me, it is written so non-geeks can understand it which is how it should be for the media.

Mr Linford said the attack's power would be strong enough to take down government internet infrastructure.

"If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly," he said. "They would be completely off the internet."

He added: "These attacks are peaking at 300 Gbps (gigabits per second).

"Normally when there are attacks against major banks, we're talking about 50 Gbps"


The knock-on effect is hurting internet services globally, said Prof Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey.

"If you imagine it as a motorway, attacks try and put enough traffic on there to clog up the on and off ramps," he told the BBC.

"With this attack, there's so much traffic it's clogging up the motorway itself."

BBC News - Global internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'

[Milo Minderbinder]

basically, SpamHaus are getting hammered, and because their verification is so important there are knock-ons elsewhere

see BIGGEST DDoS ATTACK IN HISTORY hammers Spamhaus ? The Register

[mixture]

basically, SpamHaus are getting hammered, and because their verification is so important there are knock-ons elsewhere

There are knock-ons, but they are not as internet destroying as the media implies.

As a Spamhaus customer, I can tell you that our one minute feed has only failed to be accessible for 320 of the minutes between the 16th of March and today. Furthermore, those 320 minutes were not consecutive but very much spread out once their countermeasures kicked in swiftly.

So that's what.... less than 2% downtime on the feed. Some top network engineers there I'd say !

If that's the impact I saw as a direct customer, then the impact on the rest of the "internet" would have been somewhat negligible.

What people might have noticed is some providers temporarily re-routing non-essential traffic away from LINX over less preferable secondary routes for very short periods of time. But I don't call that breaking the internet. Infact, here's a graph from my non-Spamhaus internet monitoring the load time of the Bloomberg website



As you can see, apart from 5 or 10 minutes somewhere between 17:00 and 18:00 on the 23rd of March, there is nothing of note, and for all I know, that spike could even be something completely unrelated causing their site to load slower.

Nothing to report (pun intended !) for the BBC either ....

[Milo Minderbinder]

this report from "The Register" very much backs up Mixture's point that the attack produced relatively little effect
BIGGEST DDoS in history FAILS to slash interweb arteries ? The Register

this second report is interesting in that it shows just how some of the network nodes involved were hijacked
IT Pro confession: How I helped in the BIGGEST DDoS OF ALL TIME ? The Register

[mixture]

There are also suggestions from some corners that it was a PR stunt....

Was 'the biggest cyberattack in history' all just a PR stunt? | Technology | The Guardian

Personally, I'm not convinced I'd go quite that far, I suspect it was a real attack against Spamhaus, but I'll stand firm on my assessment of the broad media coverage that made it out to be a bigger deal than it was.

[mutt]

Gulfstreamaviator, considering where you are based, i think that its more likely that you were affected by a broken cable off the coast of Egypt, for the last few days all internet traffic was routed through Asia and was bloody slow.

It was extremely frustrating as it coincidentally coincided with a Jeppesen FD for IPAD APP update that required a complete installation of all data. And it no internet access, it basically rendered the APP useless

Today it appears to be back to normal.

Mutt