Cyber-attack hits UK internet phone providers

[AGTDenton]

If any of you use services like Voipfone, they have been down for four days due to a cyber attack.
Apparently our office has been nice and quiet.

An "unprecedented" and co-ordinated cyber-attack has struck multiple UK-based providers of voice over internet protocol (VoIP) services, according to an industry body.

Industry body Comms Council UK said several of its members had been targeted by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in recent weeks.

"An overall threat has been made to the entire industry," a spokesman added.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59053876

[ik9000]

and yet new builds are no longer automatically to get RJ11 analogue cables. The guidance now is to provide FTTP/FTTC and encourage use of VOIP telephony. It always strikes me as odd why you wouldn't stick in both if you're going to the trouble of getting something to the house. I recall visiting a Kiwi lady who after the big earthquake was able to "use the old copper line to call out while all the neighbours had no mobile/other means". Maintaining a redundancy is no bad thing. In the Egyptian arab spring protest thing the gov shut off the broadband and it was people with old dial-up modems who could get the news out and keep abrest of what was going on.

Keep RJ11 even if just for calling your grandparents. You never know when you might need it. I guess if you're the provider the back-end costs and space requirements are something you'd want to ditch, but should we be letting them? It's not like they ever seem to pass those savings onto us.

[DDY]

and yet new builds are no longer automatically to get RJ11 analogue cables. The guidance now is to provide FTTP/FTTC and encourage use of VOIP telephony. It always strikes me as odd why you wouldn't stick in both if you're going to the trouble of getting something to the house.

I'd imagine it's because mostly because analogue telephone services will be completely withdrawn in 2025. It doesn't really make sense to install all the infrastructure needed to run a line in to a new house when it's going to be useless in a few years - especially if only a few people will actually sign up for a landline phone service.

[ik9000]

but why is the infrastructure going to be completely withdrawn? Isn't it pretty good at what it does - ie a phoneline? Do we really think rurual communities will have decent broadband by then? Or is the kit at the exchanges just horribly big and obsolete and too big to retain?

[DDY]

but why is the infrastructure going to be completely withdrawn? Isn't it pretty good at what it does - ie a phoneline? Do we really think rurual communities will have decent broadband by then? Or is the kit at the exchanges just horribly big and obsolete and too big to retain?

I can't speak for BT or Openreach, but from the perspective of the utility company I work for there are a good few reasons.

Many of our assets are old, I mean really old, some from the 19th century which are still key parts of the service we provide. As telephone technology developed and spread we started to monitor and control sites via the PSTN and later also ISDN networks, with some really remote sites actually adopting radio or even satellite communication because long telephone lines would be too unreliable. Maintaining the old copper lines is costly because they are of course old and infrastructure intensive – big switching facilities, big cables, etc, the need to keep the old stuff running while upgrading or maintain it adds another layer of complexity.

Now that digital communications technologies; broadband via copper and fibre, and mobile-type, GSM, 5G etc, have become widespread and actually more reliable than the copper lines, we’ve started in the 2000s to swap kit over to digital comms. By now, thousands of our sites formerly connected by analogue copper lines have switched over to digital and only a small fraction are still on analogue lines and are due to be switched over in the coming year or two in time for the 2025 switch-off.

We’ve seen substantially fewer comms issues after the switch to digital, plus it’s cheaper and easier to install and maintain. For example, if the PSTN line to some site died, we’d need our operative guys with Openreach out to diagnose everything from the site to the exchange, now we just send someone over to swap out the 5G comms box.

Also, digital of course gives us quite a lot more capability than analogue.

Moving over to digital is a no-brainer win-win for us and I would guess that BT and Openreach feel the same about their network – old, difficult and costly to maintain, with fewer-and-fewer subscribers becomes economically unfeasible to keep running, digital wins.

EDIT: On the reliability thing. When there’s a storm we actually plan and expect a few PSTN lines to our sites to fail. To be fair we also plan and expect the same for digital but pretty much just ISDN and copper broadband. I joined the company when most of the kit had already switched to digital – I could only imagine how many sites would lose comms when it was all analogue!

[kalniel]

but why is the infrastructure going to be completely withdrawn? Isn't it pretty good at what it does - ie a phoneline? Do we really think rurual communities will have decent broadband by then? Or is the kit at the exchanges just horribly big and obsolete and too big to retain?

I guess cellular is the back up and coverage is pretty good these days.

[ik9000]

I guess cellular is the back up and coverage is pretty good these days.

yet cellular and broadband are increasingly shrinking and merging so it's not an alternative, just a package from the same provider, and I wager reliant on at least some of the same kit somewhere along the chain.

[AGTDenton]

If I recall somewhere around 2014-2018 there was a data centre failure that disrupted mobile & internet communications. I believe something DNS related failed catastrophically in Birmingham and a vast number of people were affected across the country. What surprised me was the lack of redundancy when it's drilled into us during training.

And just an update on Voipfone, they still have DDos issues over a week later.
Https://www.voipfonestatus.co.uk

[kalniel]

yet cellular and broadband are increasingly shrinking and merging so it's not an alternative, just a package from the same provider, and I wager reliant on at least some of the same kit somewhere along the chain.

Not while we still have voice over cellular. If we go down VOIP over cellular too then agreed, it's just as vulnerable.

[watercooled]

There have also been DDoS attacks against email providers over the past week or so, asking for ransom. None have paid as far as I know. On skim-reading something (and possibly mistaken so don't quote me), I believe the botnet responsible for this series of attacks consists largely of compromised, unpatched/unmaintained Mikrotik network equipment. It's immeasurably frustrating that kit like this is just installed then neglected. Same for all the useless IoT crap being increasingly connected to the Internet.

I wonder at what point the security agencies will be given the powers to pre-empt this nonsense by remotely (and hopefully reversibly) bricking devices vulnerable to such attacks. That would soon motivate people to actually update the things! At some point it becomes very much a national security concern!

Regarding the concern about lack of redundancy, it's not necessarily as bad as it first seems. For the likes of VoIP running over Openreach's network, it works quite differently to the likes of voipfone in that it doesn't run over "the Internet" to reach the voice core. It runs over a separate VLAN with configured QoS. It's sort of similar to how BT's IPTV Youview system works - it uses the same physical connection to your house but is kind of separated from the "Internet bound" traffic and is effectively a closed circuit. The connection points between telephone networks are also not conventional Internet links. This is not to say such systems are invulnerable, but VoIP != VoIP in many cases. Parts of Openreach's network (the parts that have been 21CN voice enabled), have been using VoIP for quite a long time now - the fact it's IP routed doesn't really change anything from an outside perspective. Voice calls over 4G or 5G e.g. VoLTE or over WiFi (VoWiFi) are also VoIP based, however they still operate much the same way from the user's perspective. That is all to say that, although the link between the house and the core might be using IP connectivity instead of circuit switching/baseband audio, it doesn't really make much difference in this context. IP doesn't always mean "Internet-connected".

Also, you have to bear in mind that smaller providers (in terms of network capacity) are far more vulnerable to this sort of attack and less able to mitigate against them. Independent Internet-facing VOIP providers, and to some extent email providers, don't have nearly the sort of instantaneous network capacity that huge nation-wide ISPs have. Small ISPs have also been targeted in DDoS attacks, but you see it less against the likes of the larger ISPs, and companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft - largely because of their sheer scale and ability to mitigate attacks.

[watercooled]

Just realised there was another bit I wanted to say, on top of what DDY has already covered. Much of BT/OR's exiting network is quite dated and very costly to maintain. Many of the staff trained to work on the older digital kit like System Y are approaching retirement and spares aren't exactly available off-the-shelf. Much of this was originally supposed to be replaced with 21CN MSANs during the rollout, but that project was kind of abandoned half-way through. The copper network has little future remaining, OR (thankfully IMO) abandoned G.fast as impractical, deciding instead to just bite the bullet and go all-in on FTTP.

Many (most) exchanges on the network are smaller ones which provide voice and maybe ADSL. FTTC (VDSL) and FTTP are provided from a far smaller number of 'headend' exchanges which may be the same thing in denser urban areas but may be many miles away in more rural areas. Even if you're served by one conventional exchange for voice, the fibre connection from either the FTTC cabinet or the FTTP fibre directly could well be connected to a larger exchange much further away. Many of the smaller exchanges (some of which are little more than garage-sized, unoccupied structures), simply don't have the floor space to handle yet more equipment, and there's little point due to the huge advantages brought about by fibre in terms of distance.

Decommissioning the huge amount of smaller exchanges along with the copper network could bring about significant cost savings, partly offsetting the cost of the FTTP rollout. It also greatly simplifies the network which naturally brings its own advantages. Fibre also has another great advantage in that it's effectively worthless to cable thieves. It might take them a while to realise that and you do still occasionally get fools digging up fibre cables in the hope of selling it for scrap, but eventually it should remove one element of human-caused unreliability in the network.

yet cellular and broadband are increasingly shrinking and merging so it's not an alternative, just a package from the same provider, and I wager reliant on at least some of the same kit somewhere along the chain.

It doesn't necessarily cover every possible fault or every bit of the network, but there is quite a bit of redundancy built into the core of large ISP networks, for example multi-homing/parenting (network elements having multiple, redundant upstream/sideways links to allow for failures), and variations of ring/mesh networks at the core level to allow for the same. Multiple pieces of kit and/or links can fail without causing total outages. There's also some element of vendor diversity to reduce the likelihood of e.g. a single software bug affecting everything.

[badass]

Something not mentioned yet is why no DDoS protection? Essentially a service where your traffic is proxied through one of the CDN's - networks across the internet that specialise in huge bandwidth. DDoS protection isn't cheap but then again neither is insurance or IT.