by Hal Hodson, new Scientist
It was the largest online attack ever reported. Over the course of the past week, servers belonging to an international non-profit company called The Spamhaus Project, which fights email spammers, were inundated with up to 38 gigabytes of traffic each second. That’s about 10 DVDs’ worth of data. The company ground to a halt, and another firm that tried to come to Spamhaus’s online aid was also drawn into the battle. News reports suggested the onslaught was so big that the internet itself slowed down during the worst of it. Such accounts may have been overblown, but in the aftermath it has become clear that the attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in just about anything – from software to the infrastructure of the internet itself – to devastating effect.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23334-huge-online-attack-exposes-internets-vulnerability.html
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