Ubuntu And Canonical’s Lousy Thursday

It’s Hard To Patch CopyFail When Your Linux Distro Is Unreachable

Thursday was a lousy day for Ubuntu users and Canonical as they found themselves under a DDoS attack which took down their site.  That meant that it became rather challenging to get the patch for CopyFail, a rather terrifying threat to all Linux systems which was discovered last week.  The good news was that mirror sites could still be reached, so with a little extra effort systems were still being patched.

The attack was likely from the Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq, aka as the 313 Team, considering they claimed responsibility and no other group has popped up to dispute that claim.  Ars Technica listed all the Ubuntu sites that were targeted by the DDoS and it is disturbingly long.  The attack was pulled off using Beam, a service long despised by security experts.  Beam is supposed to be a tool to simulate heavy loads to test the reliability of your servers, but unfortunately it is also used for nefarious purposes.  It can be targeted against unsuspecting sites and set to such a level that it will take down even very robust hosts.

It’s still not clear why it took Ubuntu over a day to restore service but they are indeed now up.  If you were wondering what happened, now you know.