Online gambling DDoS attack also hammers Swedish broadband

Swedish officials are playing their cards close to their chests on the identity of a major Swedish online gambling site that was the subject of massive Distributed Denial of Service attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.

The attacks were so powerful that much of Sweden’s fixed-line broadband became collateral damage, impacting the broadband connections of internet service provider Telia’s 1.2 million subscribers across the country for 45 minutes on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

The ISP has confirmed that is was affected by the outages, which hammered fixed-line broadband, digital TV, and VoIP connections.

The problem has since been resolved, and the authorities have commenced an investigation into the origins of the attack, according to a report on ZDNet, which quoted a Telia spokesman as saying:

“Telia was not the prime target. It was an internet gaming company that was attacked and they sent us massive traffic which our DNS servers could not handle. We will of course investigate this incident further.”

The spokesman declined to name the gaming site.

Swedish news bureau TT speculated that the attack was mounted by the renegade LizardSquad, which last week claimed responsibility for a Sony PlayStation network outage and a prior attack on Microsoft XBox Live.

The report was based on a Twitter update Thursday from LizardSquad claiming that it had knocked the Electronic Arts gaming company offline.

EA has yet to respond to enquiries regarding the tweet.

The DDOS attack has raised awareness on the serious threat that these attacks can constitute; TeliaSonera’s CEO Johan Dennelind told ZDNet that the assault had left “Sweden not working”.

He observed: “It really shows the vulnerability of our era. We haven’t seen an attack on that scale before.”