Thanks for nothing, cyber criminals. There goes our chance to pirate enough content to make it through Easter.

Internet users around the globe have been subjected to slower internet speeds over the past week due to a global cyberattack. That was not a line from a Tom Clancy novel. This particular cyberattack is the biggest yet in history. The DOS (denial of service) attack is targeting an organisation called The Spamhaus Project, a European spam-fighting group. The group has reportedly gone after CyberBunker, a data-storage company that hosts any content “except child porn and anything related to terrorism.”

Spamhaus is a nonprofit organisation “that patrols the internet spammers and publishes a list of web servers popularly used by spammers. The project has existed for over 12 years, and protects over 1,7 billion email accounts worldwide, according to researcher of The Spamhaus Project, Vincent Hanna.

The Spamhaus Project and CyberBunker have been battling it out for along period of time, following Spamhaus’ claims that spammers use CyberBunker has allied with east European cyber crime gangs.

Spamhaus contacted internet security firm, CloudFlare, stating that it had been attacked. The attack, they claim, was big enough for their site to go offline. Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare said:

It’s the biggest attack we’ve seen.

While we don’t know who was behind this attack, Spamhaus has made plenty of enemies over the years.

Spammers aren’t always the most lovable of individuals and Spamhaus has been threatened, sued, and DDoSed (distributed denial of service-ed) regularly.

According to Prince, the group may be responsible for blocking up to 80% of spam on the net.

CyberBunker isn’t taking responsibility for the attack, but founder Sven Olaf Kamphuis said:

This here is the internet community puking out SpamHaus. We’ve had it with the guys… What we see right here is the internet puking out a cancer.

Kamphuis says Spamhaus often over steps its boundaries and in the process has destroyed websites during its attempts to fight spam. Kamphuis said:

Spamhaus itself is a more urgent danger. Pointing at websites and saying they want it shut down and then they get it shut down without any court order. That is a significantly larger threat to internet and freedom of speech and net neutrality than anything else.

[Source: CNN News]