Kiwiblog may be patchy for a while

Inspire Net has advised clients:

This is a brief update to let you know what’s happening to our Network here at the moment.

Inspire Net received a threat from an International Hacktivist group on Tuesday morning threatening a large scale Denial of Service attack on us.

We regularly get Denial of Service attacks aimed at single customers that we have many options for dealing with in place, however the scale of this one is like we have never seen.

Wednesday was a “warning shot” supposedly, with a full attack threatened to us in the near future.

We are working with our upstream providers to see what can be done to weather the storm as best we can, but the scale of this group is very large.

We are also in contact with the National Cyber Security Centre (www.ncsc.govt.nz)  for support over what is happening to our network.

We are unsure why we are a target, these kinds of groups normally target political targets like Governments rather than Internet Service Providers.


What is a Denial of Service Attack.

The internet works by our customers connecting to us via various means, and us connecting to many other locations around the world to get to the traffic / things they want back  to them

Normally we only get traffic that you request and send it to you (eg: you go to www.amazon.com  and our network goes to Amazon and Amazon send traffic back to you)

During a Denial of Service attack, bad actors send traffic to our network that was not requested, it is normally targeted at one person / connection that annoyed someone online

We can easily deal with these style events, and do so almost every day of the week, where we blacklist the target customer upstream for a period of time and stop the attack.

In this instance, the Denial of Service attack is massive (at least 45,000 hacked devices / computers from all around the world being used to target us), but additionally the bad traffic is being sent to all our customers networks at once, rather than targeting a single customer. This fills up all the connections we have to the world with bad traffic, and stops normal traffic from being able to be sent / received.

We are unsure how the future will play out, so we are sending out this email to all our customers to give you a heads up that it might be a difficult time for a while. Our Network team is working around the clock to put measures in place to mitigate any further attacks, however, your Internet might be very slow and patchy while we deal with upstream providers to block the attack as it happens.  Additionally our helpdesk will likely be swamped with callers.

This is an event beyond our control, and I assure you we will do our very best to get through it as quickly and painlessly as we can. We will post updates to our Facebook page here as we know more.

A number of readers said they had problems connecting yesterday, and this is why. My thanks to Inspire Net for their work in dealing with this attack, and hopefully things get back to normal in a few days.

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