South Africa is facing one of the largest cyber attacks it has ever seen, with banks, ISPs, and the government being targeted.<\/p>\n
Last week the City of Johannesburg fell victim to a cyber attack<\/strong><\/a> which led to its information systems becoming compromised.<\/p>\n The city stated that it had detected a network breach and had taken appropriate actions to mitigate any potential effects.<\/p>\n Following the hack, a number of systems were shut down by the city as a precaution, including its website, e-services, and billing system.<\/p>\n City of Johannesburg employees received a ransom note from a group named Shadow Kill Hackers demanding four bitcoin and threatening to release sensitive data unless the amount was paid.<\/p>\n On 23 October, the South African banking industry was hit by a wave of DDoS attacks<\/strong><\/a> targeting consumer-facing services.<\/p>\n These attacks were also accompanied by a ransom note which was sent to publicly available staff email addresses.<\/p>\n \u201cThreat intelligence which has surfaced has revealed that this is a multi-jurisdictional attack with entities from several countries being targeted,\u201d the South African Banking Risk Information Centre (SABRIC) said.<\/p>\n While the DDoS attacks were disruptive, South African banks refuted reports that sensitive information had been compromised as part of the attack.<\/p>\n In recent weeks, numerous Internet service providers (ISPs) have been hit by large DDoS attacks which disrupted their services.<\/p>\n It started in September, with an attack on Cool Ideas<\/strong><\/a> and Atomic Access that severely affected their services.<\/p>\n On 19 October, Cybersmart was hit by a large DDoS attack which caused intermittent connectivity over two days.<\/p>\n In the latest incident, which started yesterday, Afrihost, Axxess, and Webafrica were hit<\/strong><\/a> by a very large DDoS attack which affected DSL and fibre subscribers.<\/p>\n The attack<\/strong><\/a>, which also targeted parts of Liquid Telecom\u2019s network, measured in excess of 100Gbps.<\/p>\n The attack started at around 15:39 on Sunday and was successfully mitigated at 22:40, Liquid Telecom told MyBroadband.<\/p>\n It has since resumed, however, with Afrihost, Axxess, and Webafrica suffering under a renewed DDoS attack today<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Parmi Natesan, CEO of the Institute of Directors in South Africa (IoDSA), said these attacks should serve as a wake-up call to companies.<\/p>\n \u201cThe ransomware attack suffered by the City of Johannesburg sounds a clarion call for boards to revisit their technology governance strategies,\u201d Natesan said.<\/p>\n She said these cyber-attacks represent a huge risk for all organisations in both the public and private sectors.<\/p>\n Marlon Moodley, IT governance facilitator for the IoDSA, said directors are not taking adequate steps to acquire broader skills to understand crucial developments in the technology space.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause of technology\u2019s pervasiveness, directors should make sure they acquire a broader understanding of technology and the trends driving it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He added that companies and the government should take advice from experts and ensure that adequate business continuity arrangements are in place in case of an attack.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the corporate IT systems are not usable, there should be an alternate data centre with a clean, reliable replication of the IT environment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n South Africa is facing one of the largest cyber attacks it has ever seen, with banks, ISPs, and the government being targeted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":89863,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1669,1765,1759,2954,2242,35,2360,2508],"class_list":["post-324989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-afrihost","tag-axxess","tag-cyber-attack","tag-cybersmart","tag-ddos","tag-headline","tag-sabric","tag-webafrica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324989"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324989"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":325031,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324989\/revisions\/325031"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Banks hit with DDoS attacks<\/h3>\n
ISPs under attack<\/h3>\n
Wake-up call<\/h3>\n
Now read: Massive DDoS attack hits Afrihost, Axxess and Webafrica subscribers<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"