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Vodafone Portugal is slowly working to recover following a “deliberate and malicious cyberattack” that brought down services used by millions of people and businesses in that country, including those for ambulances and other emergency services.
Vodafone Portugal—a subsidiary of UK-based Vodafone Group with 4.3 million cellphone subscribers and 3.4 million fiber subscribers—said in a statement that the attack began on Monday evening. The attack quickly took down the subsidiary’s 4G and 5G networks and halted fixed voice, television, SMS, and voice and digital answering services.
“[It was] a targeted attack on the network, with the purpose, surely voluntary, intentional to leave our customers without any service,” Vodafone Portugal CEO Mário Vaz said at a news conference according to Portuguese news site Lusa. “The aim of this attack was clearly to make our network unavailable and with a level of severity to make the level of services as difficult as possible.”
The attempt largely succeeded. Millions of customers were unable to make voice calls, send text messages, use the Internet, or access cable TV, Lusa and other local news outlets reported. The operator of the country’s Multibanco ATM network said that the attack caused “some occasional instability” in its services. Other businesses and public services were also affected, including ambulance operators, fire departments, and hospitals.
Impresa and later COFINA—were hacked by a ransomware group calling itself Lapsus$. As of the time this post went live, the group hadn’t taken credit for the Vodafone outage.
