The unprecedented attack came after a Dutch web-hosting company took umbrage at being dubbed a source of spam email, and retaliated by launching what has been called the world's largest web attack.
If browsing the web last night seemed to be taking slightly longer than usual, and movies were not playing at all, it may not have been down to the speed of your broadband connection. Millions of internet users around the world have been drawn into a row between two online businesses that has slowed global internet speeds.
The unprecedented attack came after a Dutch web-hosting company took umbrage at being dubbed a source of spam email, and retaliated by launching what has been called the world's largest web attack.
Users of intensive applications such as digital TV service Netflix are thought to have been particularly affected.
The interruptions came after Spamhaus, a not-for-profit spam-fighting group based in Geneva, temporarily added the Dutch firm, CyberBunker, to a blacklist that is used by email providers to weed out spam. CyberBunker is housed in a five-story former Nato bunker and famously offers its services to any website "except child porn and anything related to terrorism". As such it has often been linked to behaviour that anti-spam blacklist compilers have condemned.
Its response was to mount a huge "denial of service attack". These work by trying to make a network unavailable to its intended users, overloading a server with coordinated requests to access it. At one point, 300?billion bits per second were being sent by a network of computers, making this the biggest publicly-acknowledged web attack ever.
The attack was particularly potent because it exploited the domain name system, which acts like the telephone directory of the internet and is used every time a web address is entered into a computer. Spamhaus said it was able to resist the attacks thanks to the help of companies including Google.
Raj Samani, of security firm McAfee, said "While denial of service attacks are not new, we are currently seeing an increase in both volume and sophistication of these types of attacks stemming from all parts of the world.
"Due to the connected nature of digital citizens, a dispute between key parties will impact everyone from consumers to enterprises. Security will need to evolve so that there is more cooperation between businesses, governments and individuals to ensure attacks like these are minimised."
Patrick Gilmore, of digital content provider Akamai Networks told The New York Times that the attackers did not believe spamming users was wrong. "These guys are just mad. To be frank, they got caught," he alleged. "They think they should be allowed to spam."
"The only thing we would like to say is that we do not, and never have, sent any spam," CyberBunker spokesman Jordan Robson said in an email to The New York Times.
Sven Olaf Kamphuis, an internet activist who claimed he was a spokesman for the attackers, said that CyberBunker was retaliating against Spamhaus for "abusing their influence" as the gatekeeper of lists of spammers. "Nobody ever deputised Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the internet," he claimed. "They worked themselves into that position by pretending to fight spam."
CyberBunker claims that it has resisted a number of "attacks" by Dutch police attempting to make arrests.
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