Ubuntu services were hit by an outage after a DDoS attack

Hackers have claimed responsibility for destroying the public infrastructure of the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, as well as Canonical, the company that develops and maintains the software. The attack began on Thursday, affecting services that Ubuntu users rely on.

“Canonical’s web infrastructure is under ongoing 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,” the company said on its website.

The hackers are believed to have launched a distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS, a crude but often effective attack that consists of flooding the target with unwanted traffic until it becomes overloaded or crashes.

Ubuntu developers discussed the attack in an unofficial Ubuntu community forum, claiming that the attack affects Ubuntu’s security API, several Ubuntu and Canonical websites. According to a post on the Threat Intelligence Forum, the DDoS attack made it impossible for users to update and install Ubuntu. TechCrunch verified that updates failed to install on a test machine running Ubuntu.

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

Hacktivists calling themselves Iraq Islamic Cyber ​​Resistance Team 313 claimed on their Telegram channel that they were responsible for the DDoS attack.

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 infrastructure to flood targets with bogus traffic. The DDoS-for-hire service in this case claims to support attacks exceeding 3.5 terabytes per second, which represents about half the bandwidth of a cyberattack that Cloudflare described last year as “the largest DDoS attack ever recorded.”

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