http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/11/anti-spam_ddos/
By John Leyden
11th June 2007
Prominent anti-spam services came under a sustained denial of service
attack late last week. The assault targeted Spamhaus, Spam URI Realtime
Blocklists (SURBL), and Realtime URI Blacklist (URIBL).
The URIBL (which, like SURBL - filters junk mail based on spam sites
mentioned in their message bodies) website was rendered temporarily
available by the assault between Wednesday and Friday. It used DDoS
mitigation technology from Prolexic to restore services.
Both Spamhaus and SURBL managed to keep their sites up and running
during the onslaught. The Rules Emporium, which hosts additional rules
for SpamAssassin, was unavailable on Friday, but it's unclear whether
this was a direct result of the assault on fellow spam-busting sites.
Last week's attacks were likely launched from a network of compromised
(zombie) PCs and were of the same type as those that knocked out
spam-busting outfit Blue Security last year, according to the Internet
Storm Centre (ISC).
"The attacks seem to be similar to those carried out against
BlueSecurity last year, with the Storm malware. Storm is a botnet that
can do basically anything..." security watchers at the ISC note [1].
On the plus side, the fact that spammers have taken to launching denial
of service attacks might be a sign of desperation, it adds. ®
[1] http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=2940
Received on Tue Jun 12 02:03:43 2007