Cool Ideas is currently experiencing another major DDoS attack which is affecting the connectivity of its customers across South Africa.

Customers have experienced intermittent outages throughout the day, with issues being reported from around 11:00 on Wednesday 18 December 2019.

This follows after a surge in DDoS attacks against South African ISPs and banks over the past few months which affected service delivery at various levels.

A Cool Ideas representative confirmed in the MyBroadband forum that the ISP was suffering yet another DDoS attack and was working to mitigate the issue.

A DDoS attack is a flood of garbage Internet traffic sent to servers, routers, and other computers on a network with the aim of making it impossible to communicate with them.

Under ordinary circumstances, generating 100Gbps or 300Gbps of traffic would require tremendous resources.

However, techniques such as DNS Amplification have made it easier and cheaper for attackers to generate large volumes of attack traffic than ever before.

When the target of such an attack is a web server or critical network infrastructure, such a DDoS attack causes an outage. Network providers have developed methods to mitigate such attacks, and so attackers have found new ways of launching effective assaults.

Working on mitigation

The ISP has kept customers updated via its announcements page, with the most recent update stating that international traffic is still being affected and that Cool Ideas technicians are working to mitigate the attack.

“We are aware of an issue affecting certain Cool Ideas customers ability to access certain websites and services. Cool Ideas technicians have put mitigation measures in place and are monitoring the situation,” Cool Ideas said.

“As a result, you may be affected intermittently as your connection is subject to scrubbing which temporarily affects browsing speed and access to certain websites and applications such as VPN.”

Cool Ideas previously said that it has implemented new mitigation features to defend against these attacks, and local Internet exchange operators have also stated that they will use blackhole routing to help prevent this malicious traffic from getting through.

Now read: How South Africa will fight DDoS attacks in 2020