Telstra users impacted by DOS attack

SYDNEY--Telstra cable users in Victoria and ADSL customers nationally suffered the repercussions of a denial of service attack last night, with services unavailable for up to four hours.

Connection problems commenced at about 5.45pm, with the DOS attack lasting a duration of 35 minutes, and customers were progressively brought back on air by about 9pm, according to Telstra spokesperson Stuart Gray.

"It seems to be happening more and more often," Gray said, adding that there had been three DOS attacks in the last week alone.

And whilst Telstra is investigating the attack, it admitted the culprit would be difficult, or "next to impossible" to trace as it didn't have a lot of information to go on--not even knowing if the attack was on a Telstra user's network which in turn bombarded Telstra's own network, or vice versa.

Telstra said it was looking at ways of reducing such attacks and minimizing the impact they have on its network.

Telstra's service status page is still indicating connection problems with BigPond broadband ADSL nationally.