Internet outage leaves many disconnected in Germany

Nearly 900,000 Deutsche Telekom customers of the German telecommunications were hit by network outages -- an attack reportedly aimed at hijacking consumer routers, the media reported on Tuesday.

The attack, which began on Sunday and continued till Monday, rendered the victims without internet service on the weekend, CNET reported.

According to the company, this is the second such largescale attack on internet-connected devices since late October.

"The attack attempted to infect routers with a malware but failed, which caused crashes or restrictions for four to five per cent of all routers," the company said.

The company is fixing the issue and has recommended its customers to "temporarily disconnect their routers from their power source to reboot them free of the malware".

Earlier this year, using distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, hackers tied up internet-connected devices into a botnet, leaving dozens of popular websites inaccessible for several hours.

--IANS

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