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SA internet companies battle attackers

Large South African internet companies are continuing to battle hackers after an attack that started this weekend.

MyBroadband first reported on Sunday that a number of Internet service providers, including Afrihost, Axxess and Webafrica, were affected.

WebAfrica said in a statement on its website that it had been experiencing a "large scale volumetric DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] attack from international sources [at] +50Gbps."

DDoS attacks occur when online services are flooded with too much traffic in an attempt to crash them.

The attacks come a few days after SA banks were subjected to DDoS attacks. The City of Johannesburg shut down its services last week after it also came under attack. The hackers reportedly demand the payment of 4.0 bitcoins by October 28 at 17:00 failing which they will upload all the city's data on to the internet.

Afrihost, in a statement on its website, said it had "mitigated the current volumetric DDoS attack which started again this [Monday] morning". Axxess, on Monday morning, warned that its users may face "intermittent connectivity issues". In a later statement it said that upstream engineers had "alleviated the current intermittent connectivity. We are still monitoring the network going forward".

Liquid Telecom, a large data, voice and IP provider on the continent, told Fin24 on Monday afternoon that it was still facing a DDoS attacks that were "re-occurring sporadically". 

The telecoms provider said the attack related to a "specific customer" which it did not name. "Our Cyber Response team is actively responding to each attack whilst also proactively managing the situation".

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