14 DAY TRIAL // Update. Spamhaus has revealed that Anonymous hackers are not behind the DDOS attack launched against their website and mail server. See end of the article for more details.
A couple of days ago, the website and the mail servers of Spamhaus, the renowned anti-spam service, became inaccessible. No one knew what was going on until Monday, when the company started notifying its customers of a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack against its servers.
Shortly after, hackers claiming to be part of Anonymous published a statement in which they demanded that The Spamhaus Project – which they call “an offshore criminal network of tax circumventing self-declared Internet terrorists pretending to be 'spam' fighters” – seize several of their activities.
The activities condemned by the hackers include listing personal information without permission, listing IP ranges that are not source of spam, blackmail, and the use of slanderous terms.
The hackers demand that the organization compensate everyone affected by the listing of non-spam related IP addresses.
“Spamhaus has recently blackmailed several multinational carriers into disconnecting clients, breaching their own contracts, without any legal procedure whatsoever, and pretty much everyone on the internet so-far has feared Spamhaus too much to report them to the authorities, weather they have a legal department to do so or not,” the hackers stated.
“Reporting Spamhaus to the authorities has shown to result in more listings, such as on their DROP list, which breaks access to significant parts of the internet completely. Spamhaus advertising its use as such, constitutes to breach of the UK Computer Sabotage Act,” they added.
“They know that by listing anything on DROP, they're breaking internet access (at least partially), and use it as a means to terrorize people into giving them their way.”
This is not the first time when Spamhaus is accused of extortion. Back in 2011, the project faced similar accusations from a Dutch ISP. At the time, Spamhaus responded to the accusations.
Update. According to Spamhaus, the individual who published the Pastebin post is Andrew Jacob Stephens of Cincinnati Ohio, a spammer listed in Spamhaus ROKSO.
“The DDoS attack carried out against the Spamhaus website over the weekend was carried out by a Russian criminal malware gang and not by Anonymous,” Spamhaus stated.