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MetService staff remain on “high alert” after the forecaster was targeted in a cyberattack yesterday.
MetService said it was the target of a cyber attack yesterday.
Photo: 123rf
You have now confirmed that you continue to have problems with your website as a result of the attack, and that all web traffic is redirected to a backup site.
Yesterday, MetService said that its security service provider experienced a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and that it was dealt with in a timely manner.
There was no noticeable loss of performance on any of its digital platforms.
The NZX stock exchange has suffered major disruptions in the past week due to DDoS attacks.
After yesterday’s DDoS attack, https://t.co/KjoElHh2uF had intermittent issues this morning.
To be safe, from just before 9am, traffic has been directed to our backup site which contains all critical New Zealand safety information, radar images and brief forecasts.
– MetService (@MetService) September 1, 2020
The stock market suffered trade shutdowns last week and an outage on Monday for the fifth day after denial-of-service attacks took its website offline. The company beefed up its defenses with the help of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and global IT company Akamai.
Andrew Little, the minister overseeing the GCSB, said the NZX and other institutions received messages that foreshadowed the attacks. The first warnings came before the attacks on the NZX last week, he said.
Sam Curry of Boston-based cybersecurity technology company Cybereason said the longer an attack lasts, the easier it is to figure out where it came from and neutralize it.
DDoS attacks, which overwhelm websites to slow them down or render them inoperative, have been used against governments and Internet service providers elsewhere, as well as on Wall Street.
“It is a tool of choice,” Curry said. “You can think of it as a flood of garbage for people … to mess up and slow things down.”
“Many different systems can be coordinated to send garbage traffic, but that can be analyzed. It is very difficult to make machines behave in a truly random manner.
“The more time passes … you can trace it, if not to its origins, then at least you can figure out the trajectory and put something in its place. It shouldn’t have a lasting effect, even if it’s going on for a long time.”
Simple tools and techniques exist to “divert” the flow of traffic, he said, and government agencies and Internet service providers have the ability to analyze where it is coming from.
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