More than 2,000 modems were hacked as part of a suspected “denial of service” attack on an unknown third party, Eir has said.
The country’s largest telecommunications company, said in early December that the devices had been compromised and has since been investigating the matter.
An identical strategy involving other European telecom companies was deployed at about the same time to attack the online services of Russia’s five largest banks.
Eir said that web traffic patterns showed that its modems were not used in the Russian attack but the latest analysis suggests that they were being kept as sleepers for a possible future attack on other organisations or banks.
A denial of service event sends so much web traffic to an organisation’s internet system that it crashes the target’s web pages, email and other online services.
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The hackers believed to have been involved in the Eir incident are also suspected of similar recent incidents involving 100,000 modems used by Deutsche Telekom customers in Germany and tens of thousands used by TalkTalk customers in the UK.
All three companies used the same third-party microchip in their modems. It is understood that hackers found a vulverability in the chips that allowed them to prepare them for a denial of service attack.
“Sometimes there is no point to these attacks except to show to the world that you were able to do it,” an Eir spokesman said.
He said that no customer information was breached in the incident.
Eir has appealed to customers to change their passwords and to reset their modems as a precaution.
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The hacking affected customers with one of two particular Zyxel modems, which are commonly used by Eir. The company has reported the hacking to the data protection commissioner and the gardai.