‘The start of ugly things to come’: Hackers flood European servers in biggest computer attack of its kind

Hackers tried to exploit a flaw in the system used to synchronise time across the internet

Hackers flooded servers across Europe with huge amounts of data in what was described as the biggest computer attack of its kind.


They looked to exploit a flaw in the system used to synchronise time across the internet.
Matthew Prince, boss of online security company Cloudflare, said the attack was the ‘start of ugly things to come’. He added: ‘Someone has a big new cannon.’

Hackers used weaknesses in the Network Time Protocol, used to synchronise computer clocks, to flood servers with data.

Mr Prince said his company had measured the attack at about 400 gigabits per second, 100Gbps larger than last year’s assault on anti-spam service Spamhaus.

A computer needing to synchronise time will send a small amount of data to make the request before the
NTP replies by sending data back. But the amount of data sent by the NTP is bigger than the amount received, meaning an attack is instantly amplified.

Secondly, the location of the original computer can be spoofed, tricking the NTP into sending the reply to a different computer.

Prof Tim Watson, at De Montfort University’s cyber security centre in Leicester, said individual computer users had little to fear.