Telstra admits DoS attacks after early denial

SYDNEY--Despite issuing a strong denial earlier today, Telstra has admitted that two outages over the weekend were the result of denial-of-service attacks.

Telstra spokesman Stuart Gray said first thing this morning that in a Monday morning Telstra meeting, denial of service (DoS) attacks were "not recorded as the reason for the outages." However, Gray later admitted that the two outages on Saturday--between 1.05pm and 1.40pm and 2.35pm and 3.10pm--were attributed to DoS attacks on Telstra or Telstra customers.

An earlier report on November 23 said that the telco heavyweight had been struck by a DoS attack, which disabled services to BigPond customers for up to four hours.

At the time Telstra confessed that it had suffered three DoS attacks within the period of just one week. Gray said that Telstra has been struck with "couple" of DoS attacks since.

Asked if attacks of this kind were an expanding problem, Gray said: "I'm not sure if it's an increasing problem but it's certainly a problem we're looking at managing and minimising the impact [of]."

Gray said Telstra technicians were "understanding the symptoms of DoS attacks better."

Saturday's setback affected all Victorian cable users and ADSL national customers, except Queensland, according to Gray.

Staff writer Rachel Lebihan reported from Sydney.