Telstra admits weekend DoS attacks after early denial - News - Security

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Telstra admits weekend DoS attacks after early denial

By Rachel Lebihan, ZDNet Australia
December 10, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Telstra-admits-weekend-DoS-attacks-after-early-denial/0,130061744,120262284,00.htm

Despite issuing a strong denial earlier today, Telstra has admitted that two outages over the weekend were the result of denial of service attacks.

Telstra spokesman Stuart Gray told ZDNet Australia first thing this morning that in a Monday morning Telstra meeting, denial of service (DoS) attacks were -not recorded as the reason for the outages". However, Gray later admitted that the two outages on Saturday - between 1.05 and 1.40pm and 2.35 and 3.10pm - were attributed to DoS attacks on Telstra or Telstra customers.

ZDNet Australia reported on November 23 that the telco heavyweight had been struck by a DoS attack, which disabled services to BigPond customers for up to four hours.

At the time Telstra confessed that it had suffered three DoS attacks within the period of just one week. Gray said that Telstra has been struck with -a couple" of DoS attacks since.

Asked if attacks of this kind were an expanding problem, Gray said: "I'm not sure if it's an increasing problem but it's certainly a problem we're looking at managing and minimising the impact [of]."

Gray said Telstra technicians were -understanding the symptoms of DoS attacks better".

Saturday's setback affected all Victorian cable users and ADSL national customers, except Queensland, according to Gray.