Ubuntu and Canonical experienced a prolonged outage after a distributed denial-of-service attack targeted their public-facing infrastructure, affecting key services used by developers and users.
Attack Disrupts Core Services And Updates
The disruption began Thursday and continued for around 20 hours. Canonical said its web infrastructure was under a sustained cross-border attack and that it was working to restore services.
Reports from community discussions indicated that the attack affected Ubuntu’s security API and several Canonical-hosted websites. The outage also disrupted system updates and installations, with failures observed when attempting to install updates on affected devices.
Hacktivist Group Claims Responsibility
A group identifying itself as The Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq 313 Team claimed responsibility via Telegram, stating it carried out the attack using a DDoS-for-hire service known as Beamed.
DDoS attacks operate by overwhelming targeted systems with high volumes of traffic, causing services to slow down or become unavailable.
DDoS-For-Hire Services Enable Large-Scale Attacks
Services such as Beamed, often referred to as booters or stressers, allow individuals to launch large-scale attacks without significant technical expertise. The service used in this case claims the ability to generate traffic exceeding 3.5 terabits per second.
For comparison, cybersecurity firm Cloudflare previously described a similar-scale incident as among the largest DDoS attacks recorded.
Authorities Continue Efforts Against DDoS Services
Law enforcement agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Europol have taken action against DDoS-for-hire platforms in recent years, seizing domains and making arrests as part of ongoing enforcement efforts.
Featured image credits: PICRYL
For more stories like it, click the +Follow button at the top of this page to follow us.