Japan’s largest mobile operator has revealed that a DDoS attack on Thursday disrupted some services for nearly 12 hours.
NTT Docomo has around 90 million subscribers in the East Asian country and boasts the fastest download speeds of any major provider there.
However, from 05.27 to 16.10 on January 2 it suffered “network congestion due to DDoS attacks” which made some key services difficult to use, according to a notice posted to its website.
Among the services impacted by the DDoS were the “goo” web portal, the Lemino video streaming service, dpay billing service and the “Golf me” golf-round service.
“Service impacts such as difficulty in accessing them have been resolved, but some content updates have been affected due to the impact of the recovery measures,” the provider said.
Read more on DDoS: New DDoS Campaign Exploits IoT Devices and Server Misconfigurations.
According to local reports, a number of Japanese companies were hit by DDoS attacks in late December, including Japan Airlines, MUFG Bank, Mizuho Bank and Resona Bank.
This isn’t the first time that NTT Docomo has been a target for threat actors.
In September 2023, the Ransomed.vc group demanded a ransom of over $1m from the firm, although it’s unclear if the threat actors actually stole any data from the carrier.
Telcos are particularly exposed to service-disrupting attacks like DDoS and ransomware, given their low tolerance for outages. However, mobile phone services were not impacted by this latest incident.
There’s no indication who was responsible for the DDoS attack yesterday.
A report from Stormwall in September 2024 claimed that DDoS attacks globally rose by 102% in the first half of the year compared with the same period in 2023.
A separate report from Nokia in October revealed that attacks on global telecoms networks increased from just one or two per day in June 2023 to "well over 100 per day" in some networks a year later.