Within the last couple of days, Bandwidth.com has been the latest target of distributed denial of service attacks targeting VoIP companies.
Bandwidth, a firm providing Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), services to companies and resellers, revealed that it suffered a failure after reporting on the DDoS attack on the 27th of September, Monday night.
Bandwidth Chief Executive Officer David Morken confirmed the incident and also claimed that "a number of critical communications service providers have been targeted by a rolling DDoS attack."
Bandwidth started reporting unintended voice and messaging services breakdown from September 25 at 3:31 p.m. EST.
Bandwidth has since provided periodic status updates describing voice disruptions, improved services 911 (E911), messaging, and portal access. As Bandwidth is among the world's major voicemail service providers for IP firms, several other VoIP suppliers, including Twilio, Accent, DialPad, Phone.com, and RingCentral, have experienced disruptions throughout the past few days.
While the fact that all those failures are linked to a service outage has not been established, one failure report specifically cites Bandwidth while the others say an upstream provider is implicated.
"While we have mitigated much-intended harm, we know some of you have been significantly impacted by this event. For that, I am truly sorry. You trust us with your mission-critical communications. There is nothing this team takes more seriously," Morken said.
The firm continues to monitor the circumstance with the network services and technical teams and actively engages with the customers to deal with any questions. The company mentioned that they’re going to post updates to status.bandwidth.com because they have further information to provide.
Since the statement was issued, the firm updated the details of a number of incoming and outgoing calling services with partial outages.
On its Cloud Service Status page, Accent said on Tuesday that the "upstream provider continues to acknowledge the DDoS attack has returned to their network however we are seeing a very limited impact to inbound calling for our services."
"Mitigation steps are being put in place to route inbound phone numbers around the upstream carrier the impact to service grows. We will continue to monitor the situation and update the status as appropriate," Accent wrote.
Further, on Monday, a source said that their clients were experiencing serious issues with their migrated phone lines. The firm is the downstream retailer of Bandwidth hosted products and claimed that because of the bandwidth problem, they knew major telecoms company that "was in emergency mode".
Considering VoIP services are usually routed through the internet and necessitate public access to their servers and endpoints, they are indeed the main targets for DDoS extortion. Hackers would be overwhelmed by the transmission of more queries than possible to carry out these DDoS assaults, and the targeted devices and servers will not be available to everyone else.
"Bandwidth continues to experience a DDoS attack which is intermittently impacting our services. Our network operations and engineering teams continue active mitigation efforts to protect our network," reads a screenshot shared on Reddit.
Monday night, Bandwidth said that it had restored its services, although it was not apparent if threats were ceased or demands were fulfilled as asked by the actors.
Nevertheless, it is usual for cybercriminals to stop attacks momentarily while pushing for extortion, while on Tuesday morning the DDoS attacks were resumed.
