[LINK] Optus DoS

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Chinese cyber attack hits Optus customers 

by Mitchell Bingemann, April 15, 2010 2:38PM
<http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it>
 

EMAIL and internet services for a clutch of Optus's corporate customers 
were crippled yesterday after sources within China launched a successful 
distributed denial of service attack against one of the telco's financial 
services customers. 

An Optus spokeswoman has confirmed the DDOS attack originated from China 
and was aimed at a financial institution in Australia. 

Optus declined to reveal which customer was targeted by the attack, but 
it is understood the firm in question is a multinational company.

>From 1.10pm to 3:30pm yesterday an undetermined number of Optus's 
corporate customers -- including AAP and The Australian's publisher News 
Ltd -- were affected by the outage as internet traffic slowed to a 
trickle.

It's understood that the attack caused major email outages for companies 
using US-based spam-filtering services. As the link slowed down, hundreds 
of thousands of messages were caught in a backlog that delayed email 
service by hours.

To stop the attack, Optus had to work with an international telecoms 
carrier to block the point of interconnect on its international 
transmission link -- which travels from Australia to the US via China..

--

Cheers,
Stephen
 


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