Skip to main content

Sunday’s major internet outage in Germany was probably a botched hack attack

Hacker
hamburg_berlin/Shutterstock
Nearly a million customers of German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom were knocked offline for part of Sunday and Monday in what appears to have been a failed effort by hackers to hijack its routers for a broader botnet attack.

The incident comes a little more than a month after a similar assault on connected devices worldwide that led to a massive denial-of-service attack that took down a number of high-profile web services for users mainly in the U.S. and Europe.

Recommended Videos

Deutsche Telekom said Monday that its initial investigation has shown that “routers of Deutsche Telekom costumers were affected by an attack from outside.”

Please enable Javascript to view this content

The company said “the attack attempted to infect routers with a malware but failed. It caused crashes or restrictions for 4 to 5 percent of all routers,” affecting about 900,000 of its customers.

It added that the “vast majority” of its customers are now able to “use our services without restrictions and our network is fully operational.”

Deutsche Telekom said it released a software update for affected customers and also recommended they momentarily disconnect their router from its power supply to reset it, which should help it function normally again.

Thomas Tschersich, Deutsche Telekom’s head of IT security, told German media the outage looks like a failed effort to hijack customer routers for the Mirai botnet.

The botnet scans the internet looking for connected devices that are protected by easy-to-crack factory default usernames and passwords. Once the botnet is large enough, the hijacked units are used together to send vast amounts of traffic to targeted servers until they buckle under the pressure and become temporarily unusable. In most cases, the device owner is unaware that it’s being used for such nefarious activities.

For example, it was found that web-enabled home security cameras and DVRs played a significant part in a major denial-of-service attack last month that took down popular services such as Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, CNN, and Airbnb, among others.

It’s not known who was behind the October incident, or the one over the weekend, but these troubling episodes show that manufacturers of connected devices will need to work with greater urgency to build in effective security software to have any hope of properly tackling the issue. Customers can also take a number of steps to protect their gadgets.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
PayPal vs. Venmo vs. Cash App vs. Apple Cash: which app should you use?
PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, and Apple Wallet apps on an iPhone.

We’re getting closer every day to an entirely cashless society. While some folks may still carry around a few bucks for emergencies, electronic payments are accepted nearly everywhere, and as mobile wallets expand, even traditional credit and debit cards are starting to fall by the wayside.

That means many of us are past the days of tossing a few bills onto the table to pay our share of a restaurant tab or slipping our pal a couple of bucks to help them out. Now, even those things are more easily doable from our smartphones than our physical wallets.

Read more
How to change margins in Google Docs
Laptop Working from Home

When you create a document in Google Docs, you may need to adjust the space between the edge of the page and the content --- the margins. For instance, many professors have requirements for the margin sizes you must use for college papers.

You can easily change the left, right, top, and bottom margins in Google Docs and have a few different ways to do it.

Read more
What is Microsoft Teams? How to use the collaboration app
A close-up of someone using Microsoft Teams on a laptop for a videoconference.

Online team collaboration is the new norm as companies spread their workforce across the globe. Gone are the days of primarily relying on group emails, as teams can now work together in real time using an instant chat-style interface, no matter where they are.

Using Microsoft Teams affords video conferencing, real-time discussions, document sharing and editing, and more for companies and corporations. It's one of many collaboration tools designed to bring company workers together in an online space. It’s not designed for communicating with family and friends, but for colleagues and clients.

Read more