According to reports, there's a beef between anti-spam operation Spamhaus and Cyberbunker, a Dutch Web host. Spamhaus claims Cyberbunker unleashed a barrage of spambots that is pounding the Internet at an alleged 300GB/s, apparently at enough choke points to slow everything down.

And by everything I mean everything. All companies are at risk, from smaller operations to bandwidth hogs like Netflix.

The allegation is that Cyberbunker is sick and tired of being abused by Spamhaus, which apparently blocks Cyberbunker's users. It assumes anything coming from the IP numbers specific to the domain is a spammer, which is obviously false. But, based on the purported Cyberbunker marketing, one must assume that many customers are indeed spammers.

I was sold on this bullcrap story until I looked into it.

Spamhaus says the folks at Cyberbunker are "collaborating" with some Eastern European criminal organizations and the Russian mob to unleash a spambot attack on Spamhaus. Sounds exciting!

Since Spamhaus is a point of reference for many providers, everything around the world of email and communications has slowed down which in turn slows down other aspects of the Web. It makes senseexcept for the lack of any evidence.

I tried to access Cyberbunker's site but it took forever to load. It finally cropped up with some ominous logo and a picture of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange. Ohhh. So this is where the sneaky site is hosted. Funny how that isn't mentioned in any of the reports.

Assange's various stinks with large government organizations, including the United States, changes the story drastically if you ask me.

Three links sit at the bottom of the page: City Hall Fights Back, Spamhaus Blackmail War, and Swat Team Raids Bunker. All are worth readingif you have the time to wait for the pages to load. It's as if Cyberbunker was the one suffering from a denial of service attack.

Meanwhile, Spamhaus.org loaded as fast as if it were on my local network. What gives? Which operation is actually being attacked and which is doing the attacking?

The document hosted on Cyberbunker tells a tale of woe. More than a few people seem to have a grudge with Spamhaus to the point where Cyberbunker is suing the operation.

There is something very sketchy about this fight and it's unclear to me which party is on the offensive. But if Cyberbunker is such a huge source of spam, aren't there legitimate ways to shut it down? It's been done before. If it turns out that this is really about WikiLeaks rather than spam, then we are being terribly misled by the media.

So what else is new?

For more, check out Epic Cyber Battle Pits Spam Tracker Against Web Host.