Digi, Telcotech, SINET and EZECOM, which are 4 of the largest internet service providers (ISPs) in Cambodia, have been attacked by large-scale DDoS attacks.
Local news in Cambodia called the DDoS attack as the biggest attack to have occurred in the history of the country. Sources familiar with the incident revealed that the DDoS attacks have struck the ISPs with a peak of 150Gbps on November 5 and 6.
The attack leads to a downtime, which lasted for almost half a day with internet access speeds slowed down throughout the week.
After that, smaller-sized DDoS attacks continued to hit the ISPs throughout the week.
SINET quickly issued a press release to apologize for the technical problems that crippled the country's connection. Similarly, EZECOM also released its statement, but met with bad reactions.
Some users pointed out that EZECOM, which is a company that offers DDoS mitigation services, couldn't even safeguard its own infrastructure on its own and required outside specialists to solve the issues.
"The first ISP, who received ISO certification and own the first submarine cable system in Cambodia, offers enterprises and businesses powerful tool to strengthen network security from the attacks known as distributed denial of service (DDoS)," wrote a local media about EZECOM in 2017.
The DDoS attacks on Cambodian's IPS were the evidence of a big connectivity dip and spikes of high latency in internet charts.
And since there are also a series of attacks on websites and companies, security experts advised internet users in Cambodia to be on the watch out as these attacks may continue.
Initially, no hacker group has claimed the attack and no ransom has been demanded. This makes the reasons for this huge attack unknown.
But some speculated that the incident could be an inter-ISP sabotage considering previous happenings. In an incident on November 2016, a notorious DDoS botnet targeted and took down some of Liberia’s ISPs. The attack that peaked at 500Gbps was launched by a UK teen with the hacker pseudonym 'BestBuy'. Later, the attacker admitted in a German court to have perpetuated the DDoS attack after being paid the sum of $10,000 by an ISP provider in Liberian to take down its competitors.
DDoS attacks are on the rise. In 2018 they were more frequent than in the previous year, affecting business productivity and efficiency, and online operations.
