Vodafone Portugal Has Been Hacked

A “deliberate and malicious” cyber attack targeting Vodafone Portugal knocked mobile networks offline across the country recently. The incident, which started on Monday evening February 7th, suspended 4G and 5G networks for customers, as well as digital TV and SMS services.

Vodafone said it has seen “no evidence” that customer data has been accessed or compromised due to the attack. Vodafone Portugal is slowly working to recover services used by millions of people and businesses in that country, including those for ambulances and other emergency services.

Vodafone Portugal, a subsidiary of UK-based Vodafone Group with 4.3 million cellphone subscribers and 3.4 million fiber subscribers, said in a statement that the attack took down the subsidiary's 4G and 5G networks and halted fixed voice, television, SMS, and voice and digital answering services.

"[It was] a targeted attack on the network, with the purpose, surely voluntary, intentional to leave our customers without any service," Vodafone Portugal CEO Mário Vaz said at a news conference, and Portuguese news site Lusa.

"The aim of this attack was clearly to make our network unavailable and with a level of severity to make the level of services as difficult as possible."

The attempt largely succeeded. Millions of customers were unable to make voice calls, send text messages, use the Internet, or access cable TV, Lusa and other local news outlets reported. The operator of the country's Multibanco ATM network said that the attack caused "some occasional instability" in its services.

Other businesses and public services were also affected, including ambulance operators, fire departments, and hospitals.“We have already recovered mobile voice services and mobile data services are available exclusively 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,” the Vodafone said in a statement.

Vodafone Portugal was able to restore 3G voice and data services for most of the country, but many of the remaining affected services continued to struggle. Restoration of services is being prioritised for emergency services.

"Unfortunately, the scale and seriousness of the criminal act to which we were subjected implies careful and prolonged work for all other services," company officials wrote in Tuesday's statement. The recovery process "involves multiple national and international teams and external partners," they added.

Vaz said the company hadn't received any ransom demand that would indicate it was hit by a ransomware attack. The CEO also said he had no indications the attackers had accessed subscriber information or other sensitive data. Specifics of the attack remain unknown.

The attack comes a month after the websites of two of Portugal's biggest news outlets, Impresa and later COFINA, were hacked by a ransomware group calling itself Lapsus$. As of the time this post went live, the group hadn't taken credit for the Vodafone outage.

Vodafone.pt:     Ars Technica:   The Record:    Portswigger: 

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