Ubuntu services suffer outage after DDoS attack

Hacktivists have claimed responsibility for taking down the public infrastructure of Ubuntu, a popular Linux operating system distribution, and Canonical, the company that develops and maintains its software. The attack began Thursday and affected services that Ubuntu users rely on.

“Canonical’s web infrastructure is continually exposed to cross-border attacks, and we are working to address this. We will provide further information on our official channels as soon as possible,” the company said on its website.

Hacktivists are believed to have launched a distributed denial of service (DDoS). DDoS is a crude but often effective attack that floods a target with junk traffic until it becomes overloaded or crashes.

Ubuntu developers have been discussing the attack on unofficial Ubuntu community forums, claiming that the attack affects Ubuntu’s security API and several Ubuntu and Canonical websites. The DDoS attack also prevented users from updating and installing Ubuntu, according to a post on a threat intelligence forum. TechCrunch has confirmed that updates cannot be installed on test devices running Ubuntu.

As of this writing, the outage has lasted approximately 20 hours.

In response to inquiries, Canonical spokeswoman Lelanie de Roubaix reiterated what the company said on its website.

Hacktivists calling themselves the Iraqi Islamic Cyber ​​Resistance 313 Team claimed on their Telegram channel that they were responsible for the DDoS attack.

The hackers claimed to be using Beamed, a DDoS rental service. This type of service, also known as a booter or stressor, allows anyone to pay a fee to launch a DDoS attack, even if they don’t have the technical skills or the infrastructure needed to flood a target with fake traffic. The DDoS rental service in this case claims an attack power of more than 3.5 Tbps, which is about half the bandwidth of the cyberattack that Cloudflare last year called “the largest DDoS attack ever recorded.”

For years, authorities like the FBI and Europol have played a game of whack-a-mole with these services, removing and seizing domains and sometimes arresting the people behind them.

This article has been updated to include Canonical’s answer.