As an international organization that disrupts spam operators, the Spamhaus Project has made its share of enemies. Many of those enemies possess the Internet equivalent of millions of water cannons that can be turned on in an instant to flood targets with more traffic than they can possibly stand.
On Tuesday, Spamhaus came under a torrential deluge—75 gigabits of junk data every second—making it impossible for anyone to access the group's website (the real-time blacklists that ISPs use to filter billions of spam messages were never effected). Spamhaus quickly turned to CloudFlare, a company that secures websites and helps mitigate the effects of distributed denial-of-service attacks.
This is a story about how the attackers were able to flood a single site with so much traffic, and the way CloudFlare blocked it using a routing methodology known as Anycast.
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