VoIP.ms victim of week long sustained DDoS attack

Striek writes: VoIP.ms, a Canadian VoIP provider, has been under a sustained, and presumably massive DDoS attack which started on the September 16th, 2021. The attack has been disruptive enough to be covered by major media outlets, including Hacker News, ZDNet, Ars Technica, BleepingComputer, CTV News, and The Toronto Star.

They have so far refused to pay a ransom demand, which has grown from 1 bitcoin at the outset ($45,000 USD at that time), to 100 bitcoin now, or $45 million. Similar attacks have occurred recently on several UK based VOiP providers.

With DDoS attacks against VOiP infrastructure difficult to defend against — or at least more difficult than your bog-standard denial of service, this may be setting a worrying trend.

Bleeping Computer wrote:

Threat actors are targeting voice-over-Internet provider VoIP.ms with a DDoS attack and extorting the company to stop the assault that's severely disrupting the company's operation. VoIP.ms is an Internet phone service company that provides affordable voice-over-IP service to businesses around the world. As customers configured their VoIP equipment to connect to the company's domain name, the DDoS attack disrupted telephony services, preventing them from receiving or making phone calls. As DNS was no longer working, the company advised customers to modify their HOSTS file to point the domain at their IP address to bypass DNS resolution. However, this just led the threat actors to perform DDoS attacks directly at that IP address as well. To mitigate the attacks, VoIP.ms moved their website and DNS servers to Cloudflare, and while they reported some success, the company's site and VoIP infrastructure still have issues due to the continued denial-of-service attack. "A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack continues to be targeted at our Websites and POP servers. Our team is deploying continuous efforts to stop this however the service is being intermittently affected. We apologize for all the inconveniences," says an announcement posted to the VoIP.ms website. At the time of this writing, the site is bouncing back and forth between being accessible and displaying a 500 Internal Server Error