Glenn Campbell's daughter Ashley tells senators how Alzheimer's has affected her father

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  Glen Campbell, center, with his wife Kim, left, and daughter Ashley arrive at the 54th annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, California February 12, 2012.Reuters

An emotional Ashley Campbell spoke to Senators on Wednesday about how Alzheimer ’s disease has affected her father, country music legend Glen Campbell.

“I think a person’s life is comprised of memories, and that’s exactly what this disease takes away from you,” his daughter said.

She described how she used to play the banjo with her father as he played the guitar, something her father can no longer fully participate in since his disease has progressed.

“Now when I play banjo with my dad, it’s getting harder for him to follow along and it’s getting harder for him to recall my name,” she said through tears. “It’s hard to come to realization that someday my dad might look at me and I will be absolutely nothing to him.”

She spoke on behalf of her family to advocate for Alzheimer’s research, as her famous father sat beside her.  

The 77-year-old also attended a fundraising dinner for the Alzheimer's Association while in Washington.

Glen Campbell went public with his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in June 2011. Shortly after that he stopped touring.

Still, Campbell will release a new album, "See You There," on July 30. It's a reimagining of some of his most popular songs, recorded by Julian Raymond during the same sessions that produced Campbell's last studio album of all new material, 2011's "Ghost on the Canvas."

The album offers new versions of his biggest hits like "Wichita Lineman," ''By the Time I Get to Phoenix," ''Rhinestone Cowboy" and "Hey Little One."

His wife, Kim Campbell, says her husband still occasionally lays down vocal tracks in the studio but the disease has progressed too far to allow him to continue touring, something the family and Campbell's management left open when he wrapped up his successful goodbye world tour last year.

"Glen still wants to record, but it's just a matter of if he's able to," Kim Campbell said. "It just gets more and more difficult for him all the time."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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WORST CYBERATTACK:'Bystanders' Affected as Spam-Fighter's Server Hit

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  March 26, 2013: The volume of internet attacks is up 107.4 percent, according to a real-time traffic monitor on Akamai.com.Akamai

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  March 26, 2013: The volume of internet attacks is up 107.4 percent, according to a real-time traffic monitor on Akamai.com.Akamai

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LONDON –  The Internet is under the worst cyberattack ever, experts said Wednesday.

Spam-fighting organization Spamhaus is being targeted with a massive cyberattack that experts say may be the biggest in the history of the web. The so-called distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, uses networks of computers to point huge volumes of web traffic at a company's server, a technique that invariably knocks their computers offline.

Picture trying to take a sip from Niagra Falls and you'll get the idea.

'If the Internet felt a bit more sluggish for you over the last few days in Europe, this may be part of the reason why.'

- Matthew Prince, CEO of net security firm CloudFlare

The DDoS attack being waged against Spamhaus has reached a previously unheard of magnitude, according to Patrick Gilmore, chief architect at digital content provider Akamai. Recent cyberattacks -- like the ones that caused persistent outages at U.S. banking sites late last year -- tend to peak at 100 billion bits per second. The attack on Spamhaus clocked in at 300 billion.

“It's the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet,” Gilmore said to the New York Times.

Even that tremendous number might not truly reflect the scope of the attack, however.

"It was likely quite a bit more, but at some point measurement systems can't keep up," said Matthew Prince, chief executive of security firm CloudFlare that was brought in to help Spamhaus weather the assault.

The massive cyberattack is apparently from groups angry at being blacklisted by the Geneva-based spam fighter -- and the digital assault is so great that Gilmore said the electronic onslaught was affecting others across the Internet.

Users could experience slower Internet or be subjected to unwanted emails, he said.

"If the Internet felt a bit more sluggish for you over the last few days in Europe, this may be part of the reason why," Prince wrote in a blog post on his company's site.

A man who identified himself as Sven Olaf Kamphuis said he was in touch with the attackers and described them as mainly consisting of disgruntled Russian Internet service providers who had found themselves on Spamhaus' blacklists. There was no immediate way to verify his claim.

He accused the watchdog of arbitrarily blocking content that it did not like. Spamhaus has widely used and constantly updated blacklists of sites that send spam.

"They abuse their position not to stop spam but to exercise censorship without a court order," Kamphuis said.

Gilmore and Prince said the attack's perpetrators had taken advantage of weaknesses in the Internet's infrastructure to trick thousands of servers into routing a torrent of junk traffic to Spamhaus every second.

The trick, called "DNS reflection," works a little bit like mailing requests for information to thousands of different organizations with a target's return address written across the back of the envelopes. When all the organizations reply at once, they send a landslide of useless data to the unwitting addressee.

CloudFlare also reported that the attack was massive, possibly the biggest ever.

"We have been told by one major Tier 1 provider that they saw more than 300Gbps of attack traffic related to this attack," wrote Prince. "That would make this attack one of the largest ever reported."

In an interview, Spamhaus' Vincent Hanna said his site had been hit by such a crushing wave of denial-of-service attacks and that it was "a small miracle that we're still online."

Hanna said his group had been weathering such attacks since mid-March. 

Gilmore of Akamai was dismissive of the claim that Spamhaus was biased.

"Spamhaus' reputation is sterling," he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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