Federal agencies are “urgently investigating” whether the massive cellphone outage that affected Americans on Thursday was a cyberattack.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are looking into what disrupted service at AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and a dozen other cell phone providers.
While the agencies have not shared details, a security expert told DailyMail.com that the outage has characteristics of a hack.
Lee McKnight, an associate professor at Syracuse University in New York, said the widespread nature appears to be “a massive distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against the core infrastructure of the Internet.”
This type of attack attempts to crash a website or online service by bombarding it with a torrent of extraneous requests at exactly the same time.
The surge of simple requests overloads servers, causing them to become overwhelmed and shut down.
While the agencies have not shared details, a security expert told DailyMail.com that the outage has characteristics of a hack.
McKnight, who is also an affiliate of the Institute for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (INSTC), noted that DDOS is becoming a popular attack among cybercriminals.
He referenced the 2016 event, in which the Mirai botnet took down sites like Netflix, Twitter, Amazon and PayPal.
“Some of them were launched by kids for fun, others by malicious actors, for example on Taiwan government websites when Nancy Pelosi flew there (hmm, I wonder who),” McKnight said.
“The reality is that you can’t rent DDOS attacks as a service by the hour on the Dark Web, so who might be behind this may never be fully known or attributed.” DDOS stressors and starters exist.’
The professor had speculated that a cloud misconfiguration could be to blame, meaning the outage was caused by human error.
‘TO “It’s possible that a major cloud service provider, like AWS or Azure, could experience an outage in one of their data centers, but in my opinion it’s less likely to be the cause,” McKnight said.
Lee McKnight, an associate professor at Syracuse University in New York, said the widespread nature appears to be “a massive distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against the core infrastructure of the Internet.”
‘Returning to the decline of other services: if ATT Business Services, for example, is the main trading partner of other companies, its problems would also affect its customers; at least until they could transfer the traffic to a potential backup service provider.
‘But again this is speculation with limited information; and the usual first suspect remains human error or cloud misconfiguration.’
Cloud misconfigurations are gaps, errors, and vulnerabilities that occur when security configurations are poorly chosen or completely neglected.
These errors can disrupt a system’s performance or leave the cloud open to infiltration by adversaries.
This issue allowed Russia and China to ‘attack Google’ in 2018.
Data belonging to users around the world was intercepted by servers in Nigeria, China and Russia, including those run by major state-owned telecommunications providers.
However, it is unknown whether hackers took advantage of Thursday’s outage.
DownDetector’s outage map highlights New York, Boston, Washington, Montreal, Honolulu, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco as hotspots with disruptive service.
Cloud misconfiguration can occur in several different ways, such as defaults not being changed.
Some refer to unchanged defaults as an “elementary mistake,” made by someone working with systems who did not change the default usernames and passwords.
Another is to ignore logs that collect information about system security breaches, unauthorized access, breaches, and other related items.
If records are not attended to in a timely manner, staff working on the system will be left with details that will be difficult to correct.
However, it’s unclear what type of cloud misconfiguration caused the outage or even if that was the problem.
AT&T has suffered data breaches in the last year, including one in March that affected nine million people.
In 2023, Ukraine’s main mobile service, Kyivstar, suffered a cyberattack that knocked out half the population, damaged IT infrastructure, and put millions of people at risk of not receiving alerts of possible Russian airstrikes.
AT&T was the victim of a solar flare in 1972 that disrupted landline services. A meteorologist shared on X that a solar flare erupted on the sun around midnight, hours before Thursday’s massive blackout.
However, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website showed that a radio blackout occurred on the eastern side of Africa and below Asia.
But in the United States, most attacks have stolen data and have not caused a cellular blackout.
AT&T was the victim of a solar flare in 1972 that disrupted landline services.
The storm that hit Earth was compared to the 1859 event known as the Carrington Event, which saw the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history.
If such a solar storm were to occur in today’s world, the effects would be catastrophic on our communications systems.
A meteorologist shared online that a solar flare had emerged from the sun around midnight Thursday, noting that “the timing is interesting.”
‘Yes, a strong solar flare was reported around midnight. But is it related to the cell phone outage? It’s not impossible and the timing is interesting, but I’m not sure we can say that yet, Justin Horne with Texas-based KSAT 12 posted on X.
However, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website showed that a radio blackout occurred on the eastern side of Africa and below Asia.
An ionization of the lower levels of the atmosphere by a solar flare that causes interference to long-range radios used by commercial airlines, military groups, and government agencies.
The outage, which appeared around 4 a.m. ET, left many iPhones in SOS mode, preventing them from making phone calls, sending messages or browsing the Internet.
The SOS Only appears in the upper right corner of the control center with the latest iOS software and in the upper left corner in older versions.
However, you can make SOS emergency calls to the authorities.
Some cellular networks appear to be coming back online, but that still leaves many wondering the million dollars over what triggered the massive outage.