For two companies, it’s all-out war. Spamhaus is a non-profit group dedicated to helping email providers filter out spam from their customer’s inboxes. Their efforts have been so successful it has caused several spammers and scammers to change their tactics. Before we knew that spam was not just delicious spiced ham in a can, scammers would send their email messages worldwide in an attempt to either get a victim to click on an infected link, download an infected video or picture or to trick them into some long distance financial scam.

It is big business in Russia, China, Indonesia and other countries where they send millions of emails by the hour. But modern technology, and the efforts of organizations like Spamhaus have cut into the revenues being made by these con artists. When Spamhaus identified the source of many of these illicit spam emails as coming from a company called Cyberbunker, which company fought back. Cyberbunker claims that they will host any internet need save for child pornography and terrorist related sites. Many of this company’s clients are those scammer spammers.

Spamhaus first identified one of Cyberbunker’s clients as a spammer, thereby cutting off all hope of that company being able to continue spamming for profit. Later, Spamhaus blacklisted Cyberbunker and the rest of the companies they host. With all sources of their revenues now affected negatively, Cyberbunker reps vowed revenge. Less than a week after Spamhaus blacklisted them, the non-profit organization experienced a Distributed Denial of Service attack the likes of which have never been seen.

The attack knocked Spamhaus’ site offline. The attackers utilize the DNS or Domain Name Servers to successfully overload the amount of information coming into the target’s servers. This overload can be likened to an attempt to fit 300 cars on a bridge wide enough for two. The web ‘traffic’ then backs up behind the bridge as it attempts to allow one or two across at a time. This attack reveals just how fragile the internet is. The traffic that built up on Spamhaus slowed down the traffic to other sites as well. The concern is that another attack like this one may affect everything from email services to online banking. Cyberbunker denies involvement in the attack.

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