Ubuntu services hit by outages after DDoS attack

Source: TechCrunch

Outage Overview

Hacktivists have claimed responsibility for taking down the public‑facing infrastructure of the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu and its developer Canonical. The attack began on Thursday and has affected services that Ubuntu users rely on.

“Canonical’s web infrastructure is under a sustained, 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 to,” the company said on its status page.

Details of the Attack

The attackers are believed to have launched a distributed denial‑of‑service (DDoS) attack, a method that floods a target with junk traffic until it overloads or crashes. For a definition, see TechCrunch’s guide to DDoS attacks.

Ubuntu developers have been discussing the incident on an unofficial community forum, noting that the attack affects Ubuntu’s security API and several Ubuntu and Canonical websites. A post on a threat‑intelligence forum indicates that the DDoS attack has 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 outage has been ongoing for around 20 hours (source). Canonical did not respond to a request for comment.

Claim of Responsibility

Hacktivists calling themselves The Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq 313 Team claimed on their Telegram channel that they were behind the DDoS attack.

DDoS‑for‑Hire Service

The attackers said they used Beamed, a DDoS‑for‑hire service (also known as a booter or stressor). Such services allow anyone to pay for a DDoS attack without technical expertise. Beamed claims to power attacks exceeding 3.5 Tbps, roughly half the bandwidth of the attack Cloudflare described last year as the “largest DDoS attack ever recorded” (Cloudflare blog).

Law Enforcement Actions

For years, authorities such as the FBI and Europol have pursued DDoS‑for‑hire services, taking down and seizing domains and sometimes arresting the operators behind them:

• FBI actions: see coverage on DDoS‑for‑hire takedowns.
• Europol actions: see coverage on DDoS‑for‑hire investigations.

These efforts illustrate the ongoing “whack‑a‑mole” battle against illicit DDoS services.