KEY POINTS:
Spammers responsible for last year's Blue Security hack attacks, which threw the blogosphere into turmoil, have carried out serious attacks on anti-spam services.
Using a nasty variant of the Storm Worm and botnets of hijacked PCs, they successfully shut down the three websevers that power the Spamhaus Project, URIBL (Realtime URI Blacklists) and SURBL (Spam URI Realtime Blocklists).
Steve Linford of the Spamhaus Project released the following statement explaining the ferocity of the attacks yesterday.
"The attack is being carried out by the same people responsible for the BlueSecurity DDoS last year, using the Storm malware.
"The attack method was sufficiently different to previous DDoS attacks on us that some of it got through our normal anti-DDoS defenses and halted our web servers.
"At 02:00 GMT we got the attack under control and our web servers are now back up, www.spamhaus.org is running again as normal.
"The attack is ongoing, but it's being absorbed by anti-DDoS defenses. Also under attack by the same gang are SURBL and URIBL.
"Storm is the 'nightmare' botnet, capable of taking out government \facilities and causing much mayhem on the internet. It has 3 functions; sending spam, fast-flux web and dns hosting mainly for stock scams, and DDoS. There is a hefty international effort underway by cyber-forensics teams in a joint effort by law enforcement and private sector botnet and malware analysts to trace the perpetrators."
Despite Linford's assurances that Spamhaus Project's site was back in business, attempts to log in this afternoon were persistently met with error messages, suggesting it had again falled victim to a denial of service attack.
- NZ HERALD STAFF
