Two major Australian ISPs suffer under unknown DDOS attacker

Aug 19, 2009 13:15 GMT  ·  By

Representatives from two Australian ISPs, aaNet and EFTel, have admitted tackling a DDOs attack for about two weeks. The attack has been carried out on both companies, limiting normal Internet access for most users.

On a forum post, EFTel and aaNet common representative Jason M. has announced that the recent lag in company services has been due to a prolonged DDOS attack that has been crippling the ISPs for two weeks.

“The outages have been caused by DDoS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attacks directed at our network preventing normal internet access.” Jason M. said.

Neither have the two companies issued other official statements about this incident, nor is it known if an official complaint was made at a Police department regarding it. EFTel and aaNet did not offer specifics about the attacker or any other information that they gained about them. It could be a possibility that, after two weeks, company IT security experts are not able to detect the source or the cause of the attack.

This latter theory could be sustained by the fact that the two ISPs located in the New South Wales region of Australia have been piling up new equipment in their data centers, which was initially scheduled to be installed as a service upgrade.

It loos like all the ISP's hopes on limiting DDOS effects, stopping the attack and catching the guilty parties reside in the recent equipment brought to New South Wales's data centers. “Additional equipment has been installed in NSW in an attempt to alleviate the symptoms of the attacks when they occur, however we expect there may still be outages/network dropouts until scheduled core upgrades are complete,” Jason M added. “EFTel/aaNet has been in the process of performing upgrades to our core network in all states around Australia, and has brought forward the equipment upgrades for NSW in light of these current issues.”