Hacktivists DDoS Ubuntu Sites in 20-Hour Attack
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- The Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq 313 Team claimed on its Telegram channel that it launched a sustained DDoS attack on Canonical's web infrastructure beginning Thursday, which remained ongoing for approximately 20 hours as of writing
- Ubuntu users were unable to update or install the operating system during the outage, which also hit Ubuntu's security API and multiple Canonical websites — TechCrunch confirmed failed updates on a test device
- Canonical acknowledged the incident on its website as a 'sustained, cross-border attack' and said it was working to address it, with spokesperson Lelanie de Roubaix reiterating the company's public statement
- Beamed, the DDoS-for-hire service the hackers used, claims to power attacks exceeding 3.5 Tbps — roughly half the bandwidth of the largest DDoS attack Cloudflare recorded last year
- DDoS-for-hire services (also called booters or stressers) let anyone pay to launch attacks without technical skill or infrastructure, and the FBI and Europol have been seizing their domains and arresting operators in an ongoing whack-a-mole effort
Why it matters: The attack rendered Ubuntu users — a base that includes servers and developers worldwide — unable to pull security updates for nearly a day, a meaningful window of exposure for a distro that markets itself on reliability. The fact that the attackers used a rented tool rather than bespoke infrastructure shows how commoditized high-bandwidth DDoS has become: even modest ideological actors can now rent half the scale of last year's record-breaking attack.
Ask SkimNews
