STE WILLIAMS

StarHub in Singapore is the latest large network to get hammered with attacks on its DNS infrastructure – apparently by compromised kit owned by its customers.

In keeping with an emerging openness about what’s sending networks dark, it posted its troubles to Facebook.

Yesterday Singapore time, the company said it saw a spike in DNS traffic that knocked some home broadband customers offline, so it “immediately started filtering the unwanted traffic and added DNS capacity to manage the sudden and huge increase in traffic load.”

Its follow-up message attributed the traffic to an “intentional and likely malicious” DDoS, and while it knocked customers offline, it didn’t result in any compromise of customer information.

“These two recent attacks that we experienced were unprecedented in scale, nature and complexity. We would like to thank our customers for their patience as we took time to fully understand these unique situations and to mitigate them effectively”, StarHub says.

The post hasn’t attributed the attacks to a Mirai botnet, but the company told Straits Times it believed customers’ infected webcams and routers were the source of the traffic.

It’s urged customers to buy connected devices only from reputable vendors, and is dispatching its own technicians to sanitise customer kit if the owner isn’t up to fixing things themselves.

Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency and its Infocomm Media Development Authority issued a joint statement that name-checked the Dyn attack, again without directly mentioning Mirai, but added that:

“Any Internet-connected device, from WiFi routers to printers to CCTVs, can inadvertently be part of a network of ‘bots’ that can be activated to attack other systems”. ®

Sponsored:
HPC and HPDA for the Cognitive Journey with OpenPOWER

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/27/starhub_dns_hosed_by_starhubs_customers_infected_kit/