Anyone worried about the stability of the World Wide Web will take no solace in the battle between an organization that has attempted to keep the Internet largely free of spam and another that is among the world’s largest spammers.

Spamhaus, a group that detects spammers and gives their names to companies that provide email services, was viciously attacked by a group thought to be associated with one of the spam kings. The secret group attacked Spamhaus servers with enough inbound traffic to cripple most organizations by taking their websites down and stopping access to them from elsewhere on the Web. Due to heroic efforts by Spamhaus engineers, it kept its service online. However, the burden of the attack was great enough to slow traffic on the World Wide Web itself.

According to The New York Times, Internet users have reason to believe that this is not the first or last incident of its kind:

The digital “fire hose” being wielded by the attackers to jam traffic on the Internet in recent weeks was made possible by both the best and worst aspects of the sprawling global computer network. The Internet is, by default, an open, loosely regulated platform for communication, but many of the servers that make its communication possible have been configured in such a way that they can be easily fooled.

Can a shutdown of the entire Internet, at least for a brief time, be more than months away?

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