DDOS Attack takes down British ISP

2010-01-11

A UK Internet Service Provider, Vispa, was forced offline for nearly 12 hours on January 8 by a DDOS attack which was traced back to a Baltic area.

Vispa commercial director Adam Binks said, "As a result of a major denial of service attack on our network we suffered a severe outage between 1am and 12.30pm Friday January 8." Even after the broadband service was restored, Vispa's customers were unable to contact customer service because of the ISP's phone system being affected by the attack.

Chris Williams, The Register, wrote "DDOS attacks on British ISPs apparently from inside former Soviet bloc countries are common, but it is rare for them to have such a paralyzing effect."

Vispa apologized to customers for the outage and said it was "taking measures to prevent such an attack happening in the future".