Irish ISP Eircom hit by multiple attacks

The site has been experiencing problems for over a month, according to Dark Reading, with users first complaining of slow response times at the end of May. Rik Ferguson, senior security advisor at Trend Micro, claimed that it was ‘certainly clear that many Eircom subscribers are being redirected to bogus websites and rumours abound that Eircom's DNS has been compromised.'



However, following complaints from users, Eircom issued a statement that confirmed that it was experiencing a problem. The statement read: “Customers may have recently experienced delays in web browsing and may have been unable to access the internet. In some cases, customers may have been redirected to incorrect websites.



“This issue has been caused by an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic being directed onto our network, and this impacted the systems and servers that provide access to the internet for our customers.



“Eircom is working continuously to minimise the impact for customers and has taken a number of steps, including software updates and hardware interventions, to fully restore internet service.”



It later issued a second statement on the July 14 that acknowledged the problem may be a second attack. The statement read: “While it is too early to confirm, Eircom believes that [this week's performance issues are] related to an unprecedented volume of traffic deliberately directed at our network which has caused difficulties for customers over recent days.”



Dark Reading reports that multiple bulletin board users are saying that the performance problems and site redirections can be mitigated if users switch to another Domain Name Server (DNS) service, such as OpenDNS.


See original article on scmagazineuk.com