8 Operation Stophaus: The Spamhaus Denial-of-Service Attacks

Many cybercrimes are motivated by money, others by economic or political espionage missions, and all of these can be damaging and embarrassing for the victims in different ways. But perhaps the most flagrant and vituperative cybersecurity incidents are those perpetrated with the express purpose of publicly humiliating the victims. Attackers who are out to gain something, be it money or valuable information, have some stake in keeping their actions relatively under wraps—and their victims relatively solvent—at least until they get what they want. But if the perpetrators of a breach are just out to publicly shame their victim and wreak as much havoc as possible, then they have less to lose from exposure or attention, since that is often exactly what they most want. Furthermore, there are relatively few opportunities to interrupt them both because there may not necessarily be stolen money or information flowing back to the perpetrators in such cases, and because what they want is often malleable, since their mission can be adapted to whatever access or information they can get their hands on. Sometimes, they're not even trying to obtain any proprietary information or access—just making use of resources that are publicly available online. That was the case in March 2013, when the Dutch hosting company CyberBunker decided to exact its revenge on the Spamhaus Project, a nonprofit organization that compiles and distributes lists of DNS servers, IP addresses, and domains known to be used by spammers so that Internet service providers can block them. Spamhaus also maintains a ranking of the “World's Worst Spammers,” complete with photographs and biographical information, as well as a Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database, intended to help other organizations identify and block spammers.