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Coverup over broadband outage ?

Posted by: AndyJenkins on Thursday, November 27, 2003 - 04:57 PM

Reports are being recieved by UK-Bug.net that a recent announcement of an undersea cable damage causing serious chaos on the internet and which also caused internet security company ZoneLabs's website to go offline yesterday, maybe not be the complete truth.

Following announcements yesterday UK-Bug have received word from two sources that ISPs are currently investigating the cause of the failure as being a cleverly organised DoS attack instead - where ransom was the motive rather than destruction. An anonymous source from NTL writes ..

I actually work for NTL, and know the undersea story to be untrue (or at least unrelated).

The real reason was a 'denial of service' attack from someone in eastern Europe. NTL was used as a stepping-stone from which an attack on Zonelabs was launched. BT and Pipex were also affected, although not as badly, it would appear.

This is the latest in a string of similar attacks originating from the same area. Usually the attacker demands a ransom to ensure that there will be no other attacks. Apparently many companies pay up immediately, rather than risk a loss of revenue incurred when their website (often their main source of income) goes down.

So there you go. It's a cover-up.

Anonymous source from NTL. (edit : here's a link to the original source .. thanks Richard!).

Interestingly, the statement quotes that both BT and Pipex customers were affected by this action (whatsoever its cause), and reports elsewhere state that Telewest/Blueyonder customers were also badly affected. BTYahoo's Announce newsgroups incidently skirts around the DNS issues that now seem to be resolved.

Edit:
The DDoS theory is that, a theory, according to Neil Barrett, technical director at security consultancy Information Risk Management (IRM), and an expert on computer forensics.

"Name server lookups were slow but in other aspects the Internet was performing normally. This just didn't have the look and feel of a DDoS attack," he said

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