Internet and communications services in the US have been hit recently, leading many to express concerns that a coordinated DDoS attack is underway aimed at causing disruption. So far, there have been a large number of reports of services experiencing problems, including T-Mobile, the country’s third-largest mobile carrier, Facebook, along with its respective Messenger and Instagram, as well as the popular game Fortnite. A tweet from an account claiming to represent the global hacking group “Anonymous” is trying to convince people that the situation is very serious, especially since it affects services with a large number of users such as T-Mobile and Facebook, as well as the game Fortnite.
The map comes from the website Digital Attack Map, which tracks the top daily DDoS attacks taking place worldwide. A DDoS attack is designed to disrupt a website or service and prevent people who actually want to use it from accessing it. Unlike a typical, direct denial-of-service attack, a DDoS attack comes from multiple sources, making it much harder to deal with. The attack involves overwhelming a server with requests until it can no longer respond.
This is what happened in the 2016 Australian Census and what the Minister for Government Services, Stuart Robert, said happened to the Centrelink website as millions of young unemployed Australians “flooded” the site at the start of the pandemic. A few hours later, Stuart had to retract his claim that the site had been hit by a DDoS attack when it turned out that this was not the case. The huge traffic the site experienced as hundreds of thousands of people needed help in March due to the COVID-19began to raise suspicions that a DDoS attack was underway, but it was not a real attack. According to cybersecurity blogger Marcus Hutchins, this website shows a random sample of global DDoS traffic that is poorly plotted on a world map. It does not indicate an attack against the US and there is no clear indication that this is such an attack, noting that DDoS attacks occur every day around the world. He also noted that the “scary” map was nothing special, while he was reluctant to conclude that it was a coordinated attack. Hutchins also pointed out: “Without knowing the exact destination, other than the US, no conclusions can be drawn. The US is the world leader in hosting, this could be a set of unrelated DDoS attacks against random websites hosted in the US. Maps like this are nothing more than marketing for the eyes of the world.”
However, whether the outages are the result of a coordinated DDoS attack or not, there is no denying that some services are down. The DownDetector website, which aggregates complaints and online reports of outages, is seeing a huge increase in complaints about some services. T-Mobile is down in parts of the country, with customers reporting that they can’t make phone calls or send messages, but they can use data. T-Mobile CEO Neville Ray said the company is working to address the problem. Competitors including AT&T and Verizon also experienced problems, as did Cricket Wireless and MetroPCS. Similar problems were also seen on Facebook. Finally, game publisher Epic experienced problems with its store, as well as its popular game Fortnite.
