Swiss attackle and our internet emergency drill "unplug and cover"

Attackle = tiny attack; from English 'attack' plus southern German/Swiss diminutive suffix 'le'.

All of a sudden, the media are alarmed about the biggest internet attack ever.

Man, it slowed down the whole internet! 

Wow, the internet is so huge, like a massive oil tanker, only bigger.

Yeah man, gimme that...

We read it around the 25th/26th of March and activated our internet emergency drill "unplug and cover".

Yes, we invented that, and it is just what you think it is.

Then we read the whole thing and found out if happened on the 19th. And we had not noticed anything, how could we have missed it?

This is not an idle or rhetorical question, dear reader. We receive email alerts from people who run internet name servers, these boxes + software things that are the "telephone books" of the internet.

When there is a big denial of service attack, these guys notice. When there is a slowdown, they alert.

Without further ado, we thought the article was probably another of these "fillers" which made it to publication only because of the Easter slowdown.

Then, on 28 March, we saw reports that the panicky "It's going down" was part of the public relations battle of Swiss anti-spam outfit Spamhaus against their presumed attackers based in the Netherlands.

A story as full of holes as Swiss and Dutch cheeses.