StarHub says hit by cyber attacks

[SINGAPORE] Singapore telecom operator StarHub Ltd said on Tuesday intentional cyber attacks had caused web connection disruptions for some of its home broadband customers on Oct 22 and Oct 24.

The company said it analysed network logs of the disruptions and found that it had experienced intentional and likely malicious distributed denial-of-service attacks on its domain name servers.

Distributed denial-of-service attackers typically target sites by flooding servers with messages from multiple systems so they are unable to respond to legitimate traffic.

StarHub said there was no evidence of any impact on the rest of its services, and the security of its customers' information was not compromised.

"On both occasions, we mitigated the attacks by filtering unwanted traffic and increasing our DNS (domain name servers) capacity, and restored service within two hours," it said.

As of June 30, StarHub's total residential broadband subscriber base was 473,000 subscribers.

On Friday, hackers unleashed a complex attack on the internet through common devices like webcams and digital recorders and cut access to some of the world's best known websites, in a major breach of global internet stability.

REUTERS