EFTel, aaNet suffer denial of service attack

ISPs EFTel and aaNet continue to battle a distributed denial of service attack which has caused weeks of internet outages in New South Wales.

The companies confirmed in a post to Whirlpool yesterday that the attacks had been "directed at our network preventing normal internet access".

When contacted by iTnews a spokesman declined to reveal whether the ISP had located the source of the attack or a motive.

The spokesman also declined to confirm whether or not the matter had been referred to the Australian Federal Police.

"EFTel does not wish to make any additional comment at this time," the spokesman said.

But on the aaNet forums, the ISP said the attack was "against several IPs [IP addresses] in our network".

"This is going to be causing performance degradation (latency spikes and packet loss) until we can resolve it," aaNet said.

"We are working with our upstream provider on this to block the hosts that are playing a role in this."

In the Whirlpool forum post, the ISPs said they had installed "additional equipment in NSW in an attempt to alleviate the symptoms of the attacks when they occur."

But they foreshadowed further outages and network dropouts until a core network upgrade in NSW could be fast-tracked.

It was unclear what the link between the core system upgrade and the attack was. The spokesman declined to reveal whether the network was more susceptible to exploitation in its current configuration.

"EFTel/aaNet has been in the process of performing upgrades to our core network in all states around Australia, and has brought forward the equipment upgrades for NSW in light of these current issues," the companies said.