ATT outage investigated by the FBI as a cyberattack | Hacker News Reader

ATT outage investigated by the FBI as a cyberattack

dailymail.co.uk

20 pointscft12 comments

> Lee McKnight, associate professor at Syracuse University in New York, said the widespread nature appears to be 'a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack on core Internet infrastructure.'

Really curious how _the quoted expert_ got "DDOS on core internet infrastructure" from this.

eNodeB or gNodeBs not broadcasting their networks would indicate a fault in the 4G/5G core (networks unique to each telco, not internet infra), which should be sufficiently isolated from the internet to not be DDoSable by random IoT devices.

This kind of fault would be more indicative of a configuration error, targeted attack, or external dependency. If the latter, I'm very curious who all of the major US telcos are depending on in that way...

> This kind of fault would be more indicative of a configuration error

Multiple networks being affected simultaneously would seem to rule that out, no?

That, to me, implies either an intrinsic fault (date/time related bug) or external factors, which could be as you've said a dependency (or hostile action.)

It wasn’t multiple networks it was AT&T.

Wondering if maybe someone got clever with SS7 or some other signaling protocol and found a way to DoS using it, seems like a dumb way to burn it so I am probably wrong and it will turn out to be some backend service everyone uses got popped.

There is a 0% chance this was a malicious attack

Have you considered calling the fbi with this information?

We would know immediately if it was a cyberattack. That is not something anyone can or would keep secret for any length of time ina company the size of AT&T. There are just too many people involved for that sort of thing.

This is just some unimportant person trying to get clout.

You’re right that we would know immediately but I figured the we in that sentence would be the telcos and there would be a delay between the event and the report…

But writing this out now I’m thinking that multiple telcos being affected makes it that much harder to contain.

The title is misspelled. The company's name is “AT&T”.

Common spelling for the company as it's also their stock symbol.

No, their stock symbol is just “T”.

It looks like the article also sometimes misspells it.

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