Tag Archive for: Outage

Ukraine faces second day of huge phone and internet outage after suspected Russian cyberattack

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Ukraine on Wednesday entered the second day of limited communications after its largest mobile phone and internet provider was hit by a huge cyberattack, Ukrainian officials and the internet provider said Wednesday.

The company, Kyivstar, shut down all mobile and internet service Tuesday after experiencing what its CEO said was a Russian cyberattack.

The Kyivstar hack is one of the biggest cyberattacks on the civilian telecommunications industry in history, and one of the most influential of the Russia-Ukraine war. Kyivstar’s website is still inaccessible, but an archived version of it from November said it has more than 25 million customers nationwide, more than half the country’s population.

Kyivstar announced Wednesday it had begun to restore service, but Kentik, a company that tracks global internet connectivity, said Kyivstar was operating at a fraction of its normal traffic levels.

In addition to cutting off communications for millions of Ukrainians, the Kyivstar attack resulted in other critical services shutting down.

The head of Kyiv’s Regional Military Administration, Ruslan Kravchenko, said on Telegram that the outage disrupted air alert systems in multiple cities, forcing authorities to use backup alarms. Russia launched a missile attack Wednesday morning, Kyiv’s mayor said on his Telegram channel, resulting in 53 people being injured and 20 being hospitalized.

Ukraine’s largest bank, PrivatBank, announced that a lack of functioning internet connection had resulted in some ATMs and point-of-sale terminals not working.

In the city of Liviv, which uses internet-connected smart streetlights, the Kyivstar outage meant that the lights had to be disconnected manually, the City Council said on its website.

Ukrainian authorities, including communications officials and representatives from the Security Service of Ukraine, indicated in emailed statements Wednesday that the culprit was a unit within Russian military intelligence, the GRU, that Western governments and cybersecurity researchers have said is responsible for previous destructive attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Both the Security…

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Optus: Telecom boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin quits after Australian outage

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Image caption,

The firm has come under fire following a nationwide network outage this month

The chief executive of Australian telecom giant Optus has resigned after a nationwide outage this month.

Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has been under pressure to quit after overseeing a tumultuous three years for the firm.

Along with the network failure which left almost half of Australia disconnected, she was at the helm during a major data breach last year.

In a statement, she said it had been “an honour to serve” but it was now appropriate for her to step down.

“Having now had time for some personal reflection, I have come to the decision that my resignation is in the best interest of Optus moving forward.”

Ms Bayer Rosmarin will be replaced by chief financial officer Michael Venter while the firm searches for a replacement.

The chief executive of Optus’s Singaporean parent company thanked her for her hard work during a “challenging period” – pointing out she had improved financial performance despite being appointed at the beginning of the pandemic.

But Yuen Kuan Moon said the Singtel Group understood her decision to resign.

“We recognise the need for Optus to regain customer trust and confidence… Optus’ priority is about setting on a path of renewal for the benefit of the community and customers,” Mr Moon said.

The outage on 8 November left 10 million Australians and thousands of businesses without mobile or internet coverage for over 12 hours.

The failure caused transport delays, cut hospital phone lines, shut down payment systems, and blocked about 200 people from calling emergency services.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin has faced criticism over her response to the incident, including at a Senate hearing on Friday.

There she revealed thousands of Australians were pursuing the telecom for compensation.

The company is also fighting a class action lawsuit from more than 100,000 current and former customers over the data breach in September 2022.

Affecting 10 million people, it was at the time believed to be the worst data breach in Australian history.

Optus had apologised and blamed a sophisticated cyber-attack, but critics disputed that, including the Minister for Cyber…

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DDoS attack was cause behind internet connectivity outage for public healthcare institutions in Singapore, ETCIO SEA

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Investigations on the internet connectivity disruption for public healthcare institutions which happened on 1 November 2023 showed that the outage was caused by a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, where the attackers flood servers with internet traffic to prevent legitimate users from accessing online services. As per national healthtech agency Synapxe, which is responsible for the IT operations that support the country’s public healthcare network, no evidence has been found to indicate that public healthcare data and internal networks have been compromised.

Internet connectivity at public healthcare institutions was disrupted between 9.20am and 4.30pm on 1 November 2023, with most of the affected services restored by 5.15pm. During the disruption, services requiring internet connectivity at public healthcare institutions, including websites, emails, productivity tools for staff, were inaccessible.

Throughout the incident, Synapxe was able to sustain the mission critical systems needed for clinical services and operations at the public healthcare institutions, including access to patient records. Patient data and the internal networks remained accessible and unaffected. Patient care was not compromised.

Synapxe’s networks are protected in a layered defence designed to detect and respond to cyber threats, including DDoS attacks. Its systems are also designed with redundancies for resilience, and these include system backups. To minimise the risks of being overwhelmed by higher-than-usual internet traffic, Synapxe subscribes to services which block abnormal surges in internet traffic before they enter our public healthcare network. In addition, once the traffic is cleared by the blocking service, firewalls are in place to allow only legitimate traffic into the network.

On 1 November 2023, an abnormal surge in network traffic was detected at 9.15am. This surge circumvented the blocking service, and overwhelmed Synapxe’s firewall behind the blocks. This triggered the firewall to filter out the traffic, and all the websites and internet-reliant services became inaccessible. Once the cause was identified, Synapxe…

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‘It’s a pretty big issue for the city’: Ransomware attack responsible for Toronto Public Library outage

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Library branches remain open as scheduled but its website, public computers, printing services, digital collections and MAP passes are still unavailable.

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