a Mirai botnet perturbed Liberia’s internet connectivity
Liberia is connected to internet via only one undersea cable (part of ACE - African Coast to Europe) of 5.12 Tbps, shared between all 23 countries connected via ACE.
Mirai has been targeting IP addresses of Lonestarcell MTN, a telecom operators managing the Liberian ACE leg, flooding the pipe with 500 Gbps and thereby impacting Liberia’s internet several times. (well, the 6% of the country that actually has internet access).
Lonestarcell MTN is one of the 4 telecom operators
▻http://thehackernews.com/2016/11/ddos-attack-mirai-liberia.html
Many media, including BBC, PC World, The Guardian, Forbes, IBtimes, Quartz, Mashable, The Register, inaccurately reported that Liberia was totally cut off.
▻https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/11/did-the-mirai-botnet-really-take-liberia-offline
“Both our ACE submarine cable monitoring systems and servers hosted (locally) in LIXP (Liberia Internet Exchange Point) show no downtime in the last 3 weeks,” [the general manager of Cable Consortium of Liberia] said. “While it is likely that a local operator might have experienced a brief outage, we have no knowledge of a national Internet outage and there are no data to substantial that.”
Mirai announces its attacks here:
