Users of Voipfone's UK business broadband and Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) services have reported to ISPreview.co.uk that the supplier has been facing massive service interruptions for the past couple of days, that also seems to be the consequence of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against their system applications.
Likewise, South Coast-based Voip Unlimited had also reported that it has been bombarded with a "colossal ransom demand" after being struck by a prolonged and large-scale DDoS attack. They believe that it was launched by the Russian cybercriminal organization REvil.
On September 2nd, it reported that "services are operational ... however the attacks are still ongoing."
However, at this point, it remains unclear whether any additional UK Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSP) have also been affected or not. Nevertheless, the UK Comms Council – the industry association which represents ITSPs – has alerted customers well about cyberattacks and reminded them to implement "appropriate DDoS mitigation strategies."
Mark Pillow, MD of Voip Unlimited, informed that the business accepts "full responsibility of the availability of our services to our clients" and that they feel "extremely sorry for all inconvenience caused."
He further explained: "At 2 pm 31st August, Voip Unlimited's network was the victim of an alarmingly large and sophisticated DDoS attack attached to a colossal ransom demand."
DDoS attacks usually function by flooding a target server or end-user with data requests from numerous internet-connected devices (often malware-infected machines/botnets, etc.), causing the designated destination to crash or experience substantial performance issues until the bad traffic ceases. These attacks might potentially reveal additional vulnerabilities that hackers can abuse.
A number of VoIP Unlimited's networks suffered "intermittent or total loss of internet connectivity services" as a result of the attack, however, clients utilizing its Voip Unlimited Ethernet and Broadband services are thought to have been mostly unharmed.
"UK Comms Council has communicated to us that other UK SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) providers are affected and identified them as a criminal hacking organization called REvil who appear to be undertaking planned and organized DDoS attacks against VoIP companies in the UK," Pillow added.
The sheer magnitude of the attack is yet unknown, but according to an email sent by Voipfone on Tuesday and obtained by El Reg, the firm's services were "intermittently disrupted by a DDoS attack" over the Bank Holiday weekend, flooding its system with phony traffic from tens of thousands infected devices.
It is quite noticeable that the users have now become extremely upset as a result of their inability to access vital digital telecommunication services upon their return to work following the August Bank Holiday weekend.
In a statement, chair of Comms Council UK Eli Katz told, "Comms Council UK is aware of the Denial of Service attacks currently targeting IP-based communications service providers in the UK and that a small number of our members have been impacted. We have communicated the issue to our membership and are continuing to liaise closely with them to share further information and support as the situation develops."
Likewise, an alleged DDoS attack on Iran's telecommunications networks in February caused a substantial disturbance, wiping out around 25% of the country's internet connectivity and triggering an early outage of mobile and fixed-line services.
