Maxi hacker attack in Germany, user routers taken hostage

The disruptions on Deutsche Telekom's network lasted about three days. At the root of it all was an attempt by the Mirai botnet to "kidnap" users' routers

Hackers have struck again. After the cyber attack of October 21, which knocked out the Internet in most of the United States (Twitter and Skype services were unreachable, just to name two), this time it was Germany that ended up in the crosshairs of the hackers.

From the afternoon of Sunday, November 27, in fact, many areas of the Teutonic country were no longer reached by the telephone service of Deutsche Telekom. This means that millions of German citizens no longer had access to telephone, Internet and web streaming television. This is not the first inefficiency that the phone company records during 2016: already in June, in fact, German users were left without connectivity to the Net for a few hours. In this case, however, the disconnection has lasted much longer: only from the afternoon of Monday 28 the technicians have been able to restore the first connections, while for the normality of the service we had to wait until Tuesday.

The most affected areas were those with higher population density of the Teutonic country, including major cities and towns: Deutsche Telekom recorded problems in the capital Berlin, but also in Frankfurt, Hamburg and the Ruhr industrial basin.

900 thousand routers out of service

According to the first official information leaked by the global telecommunications giant, the disruption would affect just over 900 thousand routers that provide users with telephony, Internet connectivity and TV services. Prima della risoluzione da remoto, l’azienda aveva provato a consigliare agli utenti di spegnere il router, scollegarlo dalla rete elettrica per qualche minuto e ricollegarlo, ma non si sa quanto sia stato realmente efficacie.

Router in ostaggio della botnet Mirai

Nella tarda serata di lunedì, inoltre, Thomas Thchersich, capo della sicurezza IT di Deutsche Telekom, ha reso noto qualche dettaglio in più sull’attacco hacker che ha interessato i router della compagnia telefonica tedesca. Pare, infatti, che i pirati informatici volessero sfruttare una falla nel firmware delle periferiche di rete per trasformarle in “zombie” per la botnet Mirai (tra le più grandi oggi esistenti e responsabile dell’attacco che ha messo fuori uso DynDNS).

Internet a casa non funziona? Aspetta prima di andare nel panico

L’attacco hacker che ha messo KO Internet in Germania non ha avuto alcun contraccolpo sulla connettività in Italia. Se la vostra connessione a Internet non funziona, però, non dovete andare nel panico: sfoglia la gallery e prova a seguire i nostri consigli per risolvere i problemi base.

internet-rotto-g-1.jpgFonte foto: Shutterstock

Siete senza connessione Internet a casa? Ecco i nostri consigli per risolvere i problemi “base”