Did the spam cyber fight really slow down the Internet?

Reports from Internet monitoring services show that recent news of a cyber attack so big that it made the Internet slow to a crawl around the world was a bit dramatic.

The New York Times reported about spam-fighting nonprofit Spamhaus and a distributed-denial-of-service attack on the Dutch group's site that became the "largest computer attacks on the Internet" and caused a "widespread congestion and jamming crucial infrastructure around the world."

Matthew Prince, the CEO of CloudFlare, the company enlisted to fight the attacks for Spamhaus, told CNET today that the attacks -- which ceased yesterday morning -- were so big, they caused outages for the London and Hong Kong Internet exchanges. These exchanges are the meeting point for multiple networks. Before the Times report, CloudFlare put out a blog post titled, "The DDoS that almost broke the Internet."

But new reports, like one from VentureBeat, show that a... [Read more]