A group of hacktivists has launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against Ubuntu and its developer, Canonical, causing widespread outages across several key services. The attack began on Thursday and has disrupted the public-facing infrastructure of the popular Linux-based operating system, according to TechCrunch.
Canonical confirmed the disruption on its official status website. “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 stated.
Impact on users and infrastructure
The attack involves flooding target servers with massive amounts of junk traffic to force crashes or slowdowns. According to reports from TechCrunch, the outage has lasted for approximately 20 hours.
Developers on unofficial Ubuntu community forums have noted that the attack specifically targets Ubuntu's security API and various Canonical-hosted websites. The disruption has prevented users from installing or updating the operating system. TechCrunch verified these claims by testing an update on an Ubuntu device, which resulted in a failed installation.
On a Telegram channel, the hacktivists calling themselves The Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq 313 Team claimed responsibility for the operation. The group reportedly utilized a DDoS-for-hire service known as Beamed to facilitate the attack.
These 'booter' or 'stresser' services allow users to pay for large-scale attacks without needing technical expertise. The Beamed service used in this incident claims to provide enough bandwidth to power attacks exceeding 3.5 Tbps. For context, this volume represents roughly half the scale of the largest DDoS attack ever recorded by Cloudflare last year.
