If you are reading this article, chances are good that you have not been affected by what some are calling the “biggest attack ever” on the Internet… That, or you really like our blog and decided to wait for this page to load. Either way, let me tell you a little bit about what is happening!

According to sources such as The BBC and The New York Times, between March 15^th and the 19th, a Dutch online hosting company, CyberBunker, began an all-out cyber-attack. This has affected the speed of the Internet for people globally. The attack began on Geneva-based spam-fighting group, Spamhaus, because of a supposed “black-listing”, and has even reached the United States.

CyberBunker, who is known for hosting anything that is not “child porn or terrorism-related,” was apparently added to Spamhaus’ list of companies who are said to distribute “spam”, in a wide variety of different ways, shapes, and forms. Because of CyberBunker’s lenient terms of services, Spamhaus believes that entities are able to flood the Internet with spam, without much difficulty.

CyberBunker—who, interestingly enough, is based out of an old military warfare bunker—retaliated with a Distributed Denial of Service, or a DDoS,  and has flooded tons of traffic to Spamhaus’s Domain Name System (DNS). A DNS links websites’ domain names with their IP addresses, and while the attack is flooding their system, websites are globally becoming increasingly slow to get to. It has been said that these attacks have reached up to 300 GB per second, while most major attacks have been around 50 GB per second.

Netflix has seemed to be the largest company affected by this attack, but the Internet in general may be a little bit slower, mainly in Europe. While Spamhaus has over 80 servers all around the world, they have been able to fight this attack with the help of a few other companies—One of whom is Google, actually.  While this is certainly not the end of the Internet, it has been the largest DDoS attack ever reported, and an issue that may become more of a concern to many large companies moving forward.