On Sunday, the T-Mobile operator struggled with extensive outages of its services. Customers had problems with mobile data and calls, they could not call the customer line, get to the company’s website or run the application. At night, the company announced that it was facing a cyber attack. It has resumed the operation of basic services, such as calling or mobile services, and is currently dealing with minor application outages.
According to T-Mobile spokeswoman Zuzana Svobodová, hackers attacked T-Mobile Czech Republic and Slovak Telekom on Sunday. The operation of basic services, such as calls and mobile data, is now fully functional. Problems persist with the My T-Mobile application and internal systems.
“At the moment, our customers may still encounter minor outages of our applications. We are gradually trying to restore the full operation of all systems so that we can provide services in full quality as soon as possible. The investigation continues,” said Svobodová.
On Sunday, the operator on Twitter stated that the causes of the outage were a nationwide problem with mobile data. “If the customer switches off the mobile phone, it will not log back in to the network after switching on,” the company wrote. Later she informed that mobile data and websites are again fully functional, later she also launched a customer line.
With 6.3 million customers, T-Mobile is the largest mobile operator on the market and its fifth-generation network covers 21 percent of the Czech population. The company belongs to the international Deutsche Telekom group.
Cyber attacks are faced by private companies, state institutions, hospitals, the media. According to the security company Check Point, in April the Czechia was in fifth place in Europe among the countries that were most often the target of cyber attacks. While one Czech organization faced an average of 1,800 cyber attacks per week, the European average is around 1,100 attacks. In May, a massive and very sophisticated cyber attack struck the Directorate of Roads and Motorways (ŘSD).
According to the technology company Whalebone, hundreds of millions of cyber attacks occur in the Czech Republic alone every month, and almost 14 percent of the monitored devices are attacked in some way. This is often called phishing, where an attacker sends messages to entice them to click on a seemingly legitimate page with malicious content.
Source: T-Mobile and CTK
