Parts of New Zealand were cut off from the digital world today after a major local ISP was hit by an aggressive DDoS attack.
Vocus – the country’s third-largest internet operator which is behind brands including Orcon, Slingshot and Stuff Fibre – confirmed the cyberattack originated at one of its customers.
According to a network status update, the company said: “This afternoon a Vocus customer was under DDoS attack… A DDoS mitigation rule was updated to our Arbor DDoS platform to block the attack for the end customer.”
It added:
Details are still sketchy, but the outage has caused significant disruption across the country with many people working from home due to COVID-19 restrictions.
A report by Reuters early this morning suggests that Vocus’s response to the cyber onslaught may have had a knock-on effect resulting in the 30-minute outage across the country, including the bigger cities of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. We’ve asked Arbor DDoS protection vendor Netscout for comment.
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