Massive DDoS attack affects Afrihost
A large distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) is impacting Afrihost and other Internet service providers in South Africa.
Afrihost alerted its subscribers on Sunday that its network is experiencing intermittent connectivity issues.
Afrihost CEO Gian Visser said on Sunday evening that while the attacks continued, the severity and impact of the attack have decreased.
“It looks like the attacks are destined to several networks advertised by Liquid Telecom and are not specific to Echo or Afrihost,” Visser said.
Liquid Telecom could not be immediately reached to confirm whether it is the main target of the attack.
He explained that locally hosted content like Netflix, Gmail and YouTube should be working without problems.
“Internationally hosted game servers and other international resources will remain an issue until the attacks go away or are well mitigated,” he said.
Afrihost said its own technical staff and those from Echotel and Liquid Telecom are working on mitigating this attack as effectively and quickly as possible.
Spate of DDoS attacks
The latest DDoS attack follows a large attack on local banks which caused service disruptions in some cases.
The South African Banking Risk Information Centre (SABRIC) said on Friday the South African banking industry has been hit by a wave of DDoS attacks targeting consumer-facing services.
These attacks have also been accompanied by a ransom note, according to SABRIC.
DDoS attacks have become a major problem for South African companies lately, especially Internet service providers (ISPs) and local banks.
Numerous South African ISPs recently reported being targeted by DDoS attacks which caused major service interruptions.
These Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks began targeting local banks on 23 October 2019, resulting in interruptions to services such as online banking.
Standard Bank and other local banks experienced problems with online and mobile app banking following the start of the DDoS attack, but most of these services have since been restored.
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