Ziggo claims it’s more prepared to stop cyberattacks

Ziggo has taken extra security measures to make it harder for computer hackers to attack their servers. If all goes well, Ziggo customers will no longer be affected by these attacks.

Gradus Vos, a spokesperson for the internet service provider confirmed this to the AD on Friday. "The attacks can still occur, but our customers will hardly, or not at all, be affected", he said.

Ziggo was hit with DDoS attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, leaving up to two million of their more than three million subscribers without internet for several hours. In a DDoS attack a large amount of traffic is sent to specific servers, causing them to crash. The hackers targeted Ziggo's DNS servers, which are responsible for redirecting domain names to the correct IP addresses.

On Thursday the infamous hacker collective Anonymous claimed the attacks and threatened Ziggo with more in two similar videos. Anonymous accused Ziggo of bad service and poor security. "Ziggo receives payment from customers, but offer customers bad service" according to the videos.

According to the AD, the Volkskrant's website was also the victim of a DDoS attack late yesterday afternoon, causing the website to be down for 1.5 hours. A spokesperson for the Volkskrant said that the reason for the attack is unknown.