Major IPS in New Zealand hit by massive DDoS, Internet outages reported

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A massive DDoS hit New Zealand ‘s third-largest internet operator isolating parts of the country from the Internet.

A massive DDoS hit Vocus ISP, New Zealand ‘s third-largest internet operator, isolating parts of the country from the Internet.

Vocus provides retail, wholesale and corporate telecommunications services across Australia and New Zealand. Vocus offers data network services such as Internet, dark fibre, IP WAN, unified communications and telephony and cloud services to mid, large and corporate businesses direct and also acts as a wholesaler.

According to a network status update, the attack took place on Friday, September 3rd and the outage lasted 30 minutes.

“This afternoon our network was impacted by a DDoS attack. This will have affected a range of Vocus customers for approximately 30 minutes. This was not great timing with most of the country working from home, and we’d like to apologise for the interruption.” reads the network status update published by the company. “Our engineers were able to resolve the problem quickly, and customers should have come back online automatically. Please contact your account manager if you are unable to connect.”

The attack caused a widespread outage that had a significant impacted on the customers, most of which are working from home due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Howaver, the outage was not directly caused by the DDoS but by the response of the internet provider.

“New Zealand’s third largest internet provider Vocus NZ said on Friday its response to a cyberattack temporary triggered a widespread internet outage.” reported theReuters. “The company said its systems blocked a denial of service (DDoS) attack on one user but in doing so caused some Vocus customers in the country’s largest cities – Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch – to suffer outages.”

Some Vocus customers in multiple cities, including Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, suffered outages.

The company quickly restored the operations and apologized for the inconvenience it has caused to the customers.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, DDoS)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.