Anti Spam Sites Knocked Offline By DDos

According to the news reported by Techworld on June 11, 2007, there have been several attempts to knock anti-spam firms offline.

Internet Storm Center (ISC) SANS claimed that a big distributed denial of service (DDos) attack had targeted several big companies viz. URIBL (Realtime URI Blacklist), Spamhaus, and SURBL (Spam URI Realtime Blocklists).

SURBL and Spamhaus managed to keep their websites working during the attack. The Rules Emporium that hosts rules and norms for Spam Assassin wasn't available on June 8, 2007 (Friday). Though, it's still doubtful whether it was a direct consequence of the attack on other spam-busting sites.

By Monday (June 11, 2007), Spamhaus and SURBL seemed to have restored to normalcy, but Rules Emporium and URIBL weren't reachable.

Bojan Zdrnja, ISC handler, was optimistic that things would stay under control, as some anti-spam agencies had perhaps resolved the matter, as per the news published in Techworld on June 11, 2007.

These kinds of incidents are very critical and serious, as they deteriorate or sometimes permanently knock out the devices used in the fight against spammers.

This attack is quite similar to last year's attack on Blue Security and was perhaps launched via a network of compromised (zombie) PC. The attack against Blue Security used storm malware, which is a botnet that can do virtually anything, noted the security watchers and Channel Register published it in news on June 11, 2007.

Steve Linford associated with Spamhaus project, while explaining the assault, said that the attack was carried out by the same group, which had targeted Blue Security in 2006 using storm malware. The method of the assault was quite different from earlier DDos assaults on the firm, as some of them got through their normal anti DDos defenses & halted their web servers.

Linford said that at 2:00 GMT the attack was brought under control and the server was restored to normalcy, and that www.spamhaus.org was up and running after that, as per the news that Zdnet published on June 11, 2007.

Related article: Anti-Spam Laws may not Solve the Problem

» SPAMfighter News - 6/28/2007