A “deliberate and malicious” cyber-attack targeting Vodafone Portugal disrupted mobile networks across the country this week.
The incident, which started on Monday evening (February 7), suspended 4G and 5G networks for customers, as well as digital TV and SMS services.
Vodafone said that there is no evidence of any data breach due to the attack.
Deliberate and malicious
In a statement, Vodafone Portugal blamed the outage on a “deliberate and malicious” cyber-attack.
It added: “Vodafone was the target of a network disruption that began on the night of February 7, 2022, because of a deliberate and malicious cyber-attack intended to cause damage.”
At the first detection of the problem on the network itself, Vodafone acted immediately to identify and contain the impact and restore services.
We have already recovered mobile voice services and mobile data services are available only on the 3G network in almost the entire country but, unfortunately, the scale and seriousness of the criminal act to which we were subjected implies careful and prolonged work for all other services.”, said Vodafone.
“The service is also subject to some limitations, namely with regard to the maximum speed allowed in order to ensure better monitoring of network usage, as well as a more fair and sustainable distribution of the capacity made available to our customers,” Vodafone said.
Vodafone said its cybersecurity team is working with authorities as it investigates the incident.
Analyzing this cyber incident, Dhaval Shah, the Cyber Risk Mitigation Specialist at Rainbow Secure said
“This attack shows how hackers try to undermine critical infrastructure. It’s the right time to adopt modern innovations and do security collaboration to secure communications, power and other industries on which all other industries depend for their day-to-day operations and continue serving mankind. Hackers are not going to stop, they will upgrade at next chance.”
** More details will be added here as the incident discovery continues.
*** Rainbow Secure is part of UN Campaign #Buildfor2030 and is offering a unique program to discover cyber risks of different operational control systems, and help it upgrade with special extensions of a rainbow secure platform.”
