Germany’s Leading ISP Deutsche Telekom Under Cyberattack, Close to 900K Customers Affected

Home / News

Germany’s Leading ISP Deutsche Telekom Under Cyberattack, Close to 900K Customers Affected

By CircleID Reporter
November 28, 2016, 7:41 pm PST Views: 8,344 Add Comment

Close to a million Deutsche Telekom customers have had trouble getting online since Sunday afternoon which the company on Monday confirmed to be the result of an “outside” attack. Around 900,000 customers with specific routers are reported to have been affected. “According to our knowledge, an attack on maintenance interfaces is currently taking place worldwide,” reported to company on Monday. “This was also confirmed by the Federal Office for Information Security. Following the latest findings, routers of Deutsche Telekom costumers were affected by an attack from outside. Our network was not affected at any time. The attack attempted to infect routers with a malware but failed which caused crashes or restrictions for four to five percent of all routers. This led to a restricted use of Deutsche Telekom services for affected customers. We implemented a series of filter measures to our network.”

— Update, Nov 29: “German internet outage was failed botnet attempt,” Eric Auchard reporting in Reuters from Frankfurt: “Deutsche Telekom’s head of IT Security Thomas Thchersich told the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel that the outages appeared to be tied to a botched attempt to turn a sizeable number of customers’ routers into a part of the Mirai botnet.”

By CircleID Reporter

CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.

Visit Page

Filed Under

Comments

The Weekly Wrap

More and more professionals are choosing to publish critical posts on CircleID from all corners of the Internet industry. If you find it hard to keep up daily, consider subscribing to our weekly digest. We will provide you a convenient summary report once a week sent directly to your inbox. It's a quick and easy read.

I make a point of reading CircleID. There is no getting around the utility of knowing what thoughtful people are thinking and saying about our industry.

VINTON CERF
Co-designer of the TCP/IP Protocols & the Architecture of the Internet