This morning, the Portuguese unit of telecommunications company Vodafone confirmed that a hacking group disrupted its services overnight Monday, in what appears to be a failed attempt to access its customers’ personal data. In its statement, the company said the technical issues caused thousands of customers to suffer disruptions to their phone call services and Internet access. Later, it was confirmed that the outages were triggered by a “malicious and deliberate” cyber attack.
The good news is that, so far, the company has not identified indications of access to or compromise of its customers’ confidential information, although the investigation is still ongoing: “The in-depth investigation will continue indefinitely with the participation of the competent authorities,” the company notes.
This incident comes a month after the hacking of the websites of one of Portugal’s largest newspapers and a major broadcaster was confirmed; to date, both media organizations remain unable to access their websites.
Finally, Vodafone Portugal said its teams are determined to restore all affected services, as well as confirming that phone call systems were already in the process of recovery. The 4G network is still unavailable but customers in most parts of the country can still turn to the use of 3G technology.
The company did not add further details about the attackers and the possible hacking variants used during the attack.
To learn more about information security risks, malware variants, vulnerabilities and information technologies, feel free to access the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) websites.
He is a well-known expert in mobile security and malware analysis. He studied Computer Science at NYU and started working as a cyber security analyst in 2003. He is actively working as an anti-malware expert. He also worked for security companies like Kaspersky Lab. His everyday job includes researching about new malware and cyber security incidents. Also he has deep level of knowledge in mobile security and mobile vulnerabilities.
