Incidents

Cyber attacks on telecom company shutdowns Internet of whole country of Andorra

Full Internet services at Andorra suffered several massive cyberattacks since last Friday, with the last one still ongoing. The different hacks, confirmed by the Andorra Telecom company, would have gone unnoticed if it were not for an online tournament in which Twitch streamers from South America, Spain and other countries were involved at. Some of these streamers already suffered an attack last October.

This Monday morning, Andorra Telecom reported a third hack that caused some users to have difficulty browsing the Internet: “We are mitigating it; this is the third detected attack since Friday”, mentioned the company. At the moment it is unknown who is behind the attack and what their motivations are, although it is believed that it could just be a new case of trolling.


As mentioned above, most famous content creators of the Spanish-speaking Twitch community were active in a tournament inspired by the Netflix series, The Squid Game during last week, when streamers like AuronPlay, El Rubius and TheGrefg suddenly left the game at about 20:00 local time.

After tons of reports through Facebook, Twitter and the likes, Andorra Telcom confirmed that its servers were hit by a massive denial of service (DoS) attacks. The company offers internet connection to the 77,200 inhabitants of Andorra, including some notorious streamers that had moved to the country in recent years.


Given the popularity of the game’s participants, great expectations were created around this tournament, although the end was somewhat disappointing for users who kept up with the event for almost a full week. Still, affected content creators took the attack with humor.

The tournament was resumed after a pause up to three times, although the problems persisted until Monday. Meanwhile, the Andorran telecommunications company confirmed that its security teams were still working to contain the attack and restore the affected services.

As a curiosity, the affected streamers permanently stopped participating in the event, thus losing the possibility of winning $100,000 USD. Until the time of writing the article, the problems continued to affect an undetermined number of Internet users in Andorra.

To learn more about information security risks, malware variants, vulnerabilities and information technologies, feel free to access the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) websites.


To Top

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This