Ubuntu services were affected by outages after the DDoS attack

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

“Canonical’s web infrastructure is under constant, cross-border attack and we are working to address it. We will provide more information on our official channels as soon as we can.” the company said on her website.

The hacktivists are believed to have launched a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, a crude but often effective attack that consists of flooding a target with spam until it overloads or crashes.

Ubuntu Developers have discussed the attack on an unofficial Ubuntu community forum, claiming that the attack affects Ubuntu’s security API, and several Ubuntu and Canonical websites. According to a publication on a threat intelligence forum, the DDoS attack has also made it impossible for users to update and install Ubuntu. TechCrunch verified that the updates failed to install on a test device running Ubuntu.

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

Hacktivists calling themselves The Islamic Cyber ​​​​Resistance in Iraq 313 Team claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack on their Telegram channel.

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 the necessary infrastructure to flood targets with fake traffic. The DDoS-for-Hire service in this case claims to power attacks in excess of 3.5 Tbps, which is about half the bandwidth of a cyber attack that Cloudflare last year called “the largest DDoS attack ever recorded”.

For years, authorities like the FBI and Europol have played a game against these services, destroying and seizing domains and sometimes arresting the people behind them.