Coordinated extortion-focused threat groups are condemned for DDoS attacks against telecom firms in the UK

November 18, 2021
Extortion Threat Groups DDoS Attacks Telecom UK cyber attack network disruption

An industry trade group recently reported that the series of cyberattacks against telecom providers in the UK came from an organisation of threat groups that aims to extort money from targeted victims. The Comms Council of the UK has released a statement saying that the coordinated extortion-focused cybercrime experts are behind the surge of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against telecom firms.

Furthermore, the Comms Council members stressed that the DDoS attacks focused on the critical telecom infrastructure of the UK. These telecom providers serve some of the organisations within the UK, including law enforcers, health sectors, and more public resources. 

 

The Comms Council has teamed up with the UK government, watchdog Ofcom, National Cyber Security Centre, and other interagency teams to work on the mitigation of the DDoS attacks. 

 

Studies stated that the DDoS attacks have been targeting several Voiceover Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers. Voipfone, a UK-based phone service provider, has identified itself as one of the many victims of DDoS attacks. 

Security analysts have requested the Comms Council for the exact number of victims targeted by the DDoS attack; however, the trade group has refused even to offer an estimated number of the affected organisations as the information is commercially sensitive. Nonetheless, they released a statement that clarifies the scope of the DDoS attack campaign against telecoms in the UK. 

A Comms Council spokesperson stated that ransomware and DDoS threats within the UK had targeted several telecom firms while overall threats are inflicted upon the entire nation’s business sectors. Furthermore, DDoS attacks have also posed threats against the business industries in Canada and the US, which emphasises that these malicious activities are under a coordinated international campaign. 

The spokesperson also added that the DDoS attacks recorded presently has never been seen before within UK’s Comms Council history since it began in 2004. 

Related news involves a South Korean telecommunication firm, KT, which was reported to have experienced a nationwide outage that lasted for less than an hour a few days ago. Initially, the incident was reported to have emerged from a DDoS attack but was eventually identified as a routing misconfiguration issue. 

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