New Zealand’s largest telco and internet service provider suffered a three-day long outage over the weekend.
Calling the attack on its Domain Name System (DNS) a “dynamic cyber attack”, Spark said that the outage meant customers were unable to browse the web and utilise other services requiring name service resolution though Spark’s allocated DNS servers.
According to IT News, Spark said that the root cause “is likely to be a handful of customers on our network whose computers are affected by malware, generating high levels of traffic destined for overseas sites”. Somewhere in the region of 600,000 customers were affected by the outage on both Spark’s fixed broadband and wireless 4G data networks.