Canonical infrastructure remains offline after sustained cross-border attack

Servers operated by Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical were knocked offline on Thursday morning and have remained down. Attempts to connect to most Ubuntu and Canonical webpages and download operating system updates from Ubuntu servers have consistently failed over the past 24 hours. Updates from mirror sites, however, have continued to work normally. A Canonical status page said Canonical's web infrastructure is under a sustained, cross-border attack and the company is working to address it. Other than that, Ubuntu and Canonical officials have maintained radio silence since the outage began. A group sympathetic to the Iranian government has taken credit for the outage. According to posts on Telegram and other social media, the group is responsible for a distributed denial-of-service attack using Beam. Beam claims to test the ability of servers to operate under heavy loads but, like other stressors, is a front for services that miscreants pay for to take down third-party sites. In recent days, the same pro-Iran group has taken credit for attacks on eBay.