AfterDawn: News

Dutchman arrested in Spain over attack that 'broke the Internet'

A Dutchman has been arrested in Spain this week over his alleged role in the major cyber attack on Spamhaus, the attack that some journalists took the liberty of calling the biggest in the history of the Internet.

Sven Olaf Kamphuis, part of the group Stophaus, has been arrested for the attack. The group has stated its goal is to shut down the anti-spam Spamhaus operation.



Kamphuis is expected to be transferred over to the Dutch Public Prosecution Service.

In March, the major DDoS attack "broke the Internet," although that claim has since been discredited. Spamhaus is a network that creates "a real-time blacklist of servers they believe are used to send out spam email." The company directly and indirectly filters up to 80 percent of all daily spam messages, which can sometimes total in the hundreds of millions.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 27 Apr 2013 21:25

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• Qliphah

  Yet while it didn't shut down the internet it did stop ecommerce for at least a few hours. Many corporations use Spamhaus to filter their mail and unfortunately the way spamhaus is setup if it goes down or a erroneous IP is flagged as a spammer your email could be blocked for days. Of course it doesn't take a massive attack to do this, Spamhaus has shut us off from customers that use their service several times in what seem like random blockings of our IPs. Honestly I think corporations have put to much reliance on spamhaus and 3rd party hosts with their email. A smart company would host locally or at least with a good ISP that knows where the servers are located.
  

  29.4.2013 09:31 #1