Australian telco Primus said it came under an intense denial of service attack on Wednesday.

The botnet-powered assault, aimed at its core routers, limited connectivity for Primus customers to sites outside Australia, according to a status message on its support page. The source or motive for the attack - which started around 1730 local time (0630 GMT) - remains unclear.

As of about half past 5 this afternoon (Wednesday May 21'st 2008) iPrimus has been under a Massive DoS Attack.

The attack is coming (as usual) from thousands of compromised systems all over the world, and while we have blocked their connections to the host they were attacking at our Core Routers, they are unfortunately still able to thrash out our International links, causing all International traffic to crawl to a snails-pace.

Please be patient while the attack is on-going and avoid using any bandwidth sites that are hosted outside of Australia.

By around midnight local time (1300 GMT) services other than email had been restored. A security contact of the Reg, who is based in Australia and happens to use Primus for her home connection, failed to notice anything untoward so it may be that Primus's stark warning overstates the problem.

Primus competes with incumbent Telstra as one of the two main carriers down under. ®

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