Ubuntu services were hit by an outage after a DDoS attack

Hackers have claimed responsibility for destroying the public infrastructure of the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, as well as Canonical, the company that develops and maintains the software. The attack began on Thursday, affecting services that Ubuntu users rely on.

“Canonical’s web infrastructure is under ongoing cross-border attack and we are working to address it. We will provide more information in our official channels as soon as we are able,” The company said On its website.

Hacktivists are believed to have launched a distributed denial-of-service operation, or DDoSa simple but often effective attack that consists of flooding the target with unwanted traffic until it overloads or crashes.

Ubuntu developers It’s been discussed Attack on the unofficial Ubuntu community forum, claiming that the attack affects Ubuntu’s security API and several Ubuntu and Canical sites. According to one publication In a threat intelligence forum, the DDoS attack also made it impossible for users to update and install Ubuntu. TechCrunch verified that updates failed to install on a test device running Ubuntu.

As of this writing, the power outage has been ongoing for about an hour 20 hours. Canonical did not respond to a request for comment.

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

The hackers claimed to be using Beamed, a DDoS-for-hire service. These types of services, also called Booters or Stressers, allow anyone to pay to launch DDoS attacks, even if they don’t have the technical skills or infrastructure to flood targets with fake traffic. The DDoS-for-hire service in this case claims to be able to launch attacks exceeding 3.5 terabytes per second, which represents about half the bandwidth of a cyber attack. Cloudflare last year It’s called the “largest DDoS attack ever recorded.”

For years, authorities like Federal Bureau of Investigation and Europol They played a game of whack against these services, Take down and Seize domainsAnd sometimes the people behind them are arrested.