Pan-African telecoms company Liquid Telecom and Internet service provider Webafrica have become the latest victims of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
This, after the City of Johannesburg and South African banks fell prey to cyber attacks last week.
DDoS attacks occur when multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually one or more Web servers.
Such an attack is often the result of multiple compromised systems (for example, a botnet) flooding the targeted system with traffic.
In a short statement sent to ITWeb, Liquid Telecom says: “The attack, which relates to a specific customer, is re-occurring sporadically and our cyber response team is actively responding to each attack whilst also proactively managing the situation.”
On its Web site, Webafrica says: “On investigation with the upstream core engineer team, it was confirmed they are experiencing a large-scale volumetric DDoS attack from international sources +50Gbps.
“The upstream provider has implemented additional mitigation controls on the volumetric DDoS attack and traffic returned to normal at 22h20. An additional attack was experienced at 00h00 and engineers were able to mitigate the attack at 00h10.”
According to the ISP, services have returned to normal, and engineers will continue to closely monitor the network.
“We apologise for the inconvenience and we promise to keep you posted with any updates from our infrastructure providers,” says Webafrica.
Last week Friday, the South African Banking Risk Information Centre said South African banks were targeted in DDoS attacks.
This after the City of Johannesburg said it detected a network breach which resulted in unauthorised access to its information systems.
The cyber criminals have since given the city until 5pm today to pay a ransom of 4.0 Bitcoin, failing which they will upload all the data onto the Internet.
Share