Pro-Iran Group Claims DDoS Attack on Ubuntu and Canonical Servers

Servers operated by Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical were knocked offline on Thursday morning and have remained down ever since. A group sympathetic to the Iranian government has taken credit for the outage, attributing it to a DDoS attack using Beam. The same pro-Iran group has taken credit for DDoSes on eBay in recent days.

The outage is preventing Ubuntu from communicating normally following the botched disclosure of a major vulnerability. Attempts to connect to most Ubuntu and Canonical webpages have failed over the past 24 hours. Attempts to download OS updates from Ubuntu servers have failed over the past 24 hours, though updates from mirror sites have continued to work normally.

Other than that, Ubuntu and Canonical officials have maintained radio silence since the outage began. The group responsible posted on Telegram and other social media about using Beam, an operation that claims to test server loads but functions as a DDoS service. com.

The outage has limited Ubuntu’s ability to communicate security guidance to affected users. Ubuntu and Canonical infrastructure went down hours after researchers released potent exploit code. The exploit code allowed untrusted users in data centers, university settings, and elsewhere to gain root control of servers running virtually all Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.

The outage has hampered communication concerning a critical vulnerability that gives root.