By all accounts, Eircom has been hacked.
The telco has confirmed that there was a domain name server (DNS) outage on its website last night.
Internet users throughout Ireland complained they were being redirected to bogus sites.
Eircom customers have noticed slowdowns since the beginning of the month, and noticeably since this weekend, due to DNS delays.
Some users found that when visiting popular sites such as Facebook or RTE, they were redirected to sites showing pictures of scantily clad women or advertising.
Most sites behaved normally, if a little slow to load.
‘This issue has been caused by an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic being directed onto our network, and this impacted the systems and servers that provide access to the Internet for our customers,’ an Eircom spokesperson said.
To the computer literate, that sounds like a Denial of Service (DOS) attack.
But the company has yet to say exactly what went wrong, or confirm it was hacked.
If you are an Eircom customer, and still experiencing problems with your connection, switching to OpenDNS should solve your problems. And if you’re lucky, mainstream newspapers may wonder what went wrong at Eircom and ask a few awkward questions.
