How the Spamhaus DDoS attack could have been prevented

Cyber war could slow internet service

Nearly 13 years ago, the wizardly band of engineers who invented and continue to defend the Internet published a prescient document they called BCP38, which described ways to thwart the most common forms of distributed denial-of-service attack.

BCP38, short for Best Current Practice #38, was published soon after debilitating denial of service attacks crippled eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, and other major sites in February 2000. If those guidelines to stop malcontents from forging Internet addresses had been widely adopted by the companies, universities, and government agencies that operate the modern Internet, this week's electronic onslaught targeting Spamhaus would have been prevented.

But they weren't. So a 300-gigabit-per-second torrent of traffic flooded into the networks of companies including Spamhaus, Cloudflare, and key Internet switching stations in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London. It was like 1,000 cars trying to crowd onto a highway designed for 100 vehicles at a time. Cloudflare ... [Read more]