Industry body Comms Council UK has called the recent wave of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) cyberattacks in the UK "unprecedented", adding that the attacks pose a threat to the entire industry. Speaking to the BBC, a Comms Council UK spokesman said that while he could not specify the number of companies affected, he could confirm that several of its members had been targeted by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in recent weeks. . In the past, DDoS attacks were often used to take websites offline. However, the recent wave of attacks on VoIP providers has been carried out in the hope of extorting money from companies, in the form of ransomware attacks. Ofcom, the UK's communications regulator, said it was aware of the situation.
Coordinated attack
In a statement, the UK Comms Council said that the DDoS attacks against UK-based VoIP companies that have taken place over the past four weeks "appear to be part of a coordinated international campaign focused on extortion by professional cybercriminals. The telecoms industry body said it had raised the issue with the UK government, Ofcom, as well as the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC). “We have never seen anything like it since our creation in 2004,” stressed the Comms Council UK spokesman. In the UK, VoIP providers offer calls over the Internet to a variety of customers, including businesses and public services such as the police and the NHS. While the attacks have yet to cause debilitating problems, if left unchecked, they have the potential to disrupt today's remote work environments by negatively impacting Internet communication platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.