An DDoS caused broadband disruption across Sweden this week.
While DDoS attacks typically only affect the target, this particular attack affected the broadband connections of an entire country. This happened to customers of Telia, Sweden's largest ISP, for 45 minutes on Tuesday evening and then again intermittently throughout Wednesday afternoon and evening.
Telia has not announced how many of its 1.2 million residential subscribers were affected by the outage, but it confirmed the attack and the knock-out of fixed broadband, digital TV, and VoIP connections.
The company issued a statement Wednesday night stressing that the issue had been resolved and that it was investigating the source of the attack. It initially thought it was the target of the attack, but a company spokesperson told ZDNet that the target was an online gaming site.
“Telia was not the primary target. The target was an online gaming company that was attacked by sending massive traffic to the DNS servers, which we could not handle. Of course, we will investigate the incident further,” said a Telia spokesperson. He declined to name the website.
According to Swedish news agency TT, the group behind the attack was LizardSquad. The group last week claimed responsibility for taking down Sony's PlayStation Network and in an earlier attack took down Microsoft's Xbox Live.
LizardSquad claimed via Twitter on Thursday that it had knocked gaming company Electronic Arts offline.
The attack was so powerful that at an Ericsson event in Stockholm, TeliaSonera CEO Johan Dennelind said that the DDoS attack made “Sweden not work.”.
“Our ISP has faced DDoS attacks, this one was particularly ‘heavy,’” he said. “We haven’t seen another attack of this scale,” Dennilind said.
