A large number of Spanish Internet users who use the Orange service today find themselves unable to surf the Internet as always; But even if this does not seem to be the case, in reality the connection as such was not interrupted, but rather the problem was something more worrying: inappropriate access to a very significant part of European operators.
As indicated Fault detectorthe problems of Orange users They started around 4 p.m. Spanish Peninsula Time; although it was only from 5 p.m. that complaints began to fill social networks such as X (Twitter) and Facebook. Interestingly, users of other operators like Movistar have also reported sporadic outages.
All these complaints have the same thing in common: when users try to access a web page, the browser shows them an error or simply unable to load page complete. A common symptom is that the browser goes blank and loads endlessly; No matter how long we leave the system on, it does not solve the problem. This failure in turn caused many users of popular services to report loading failures; For example, Discord, Microsoft 365, Xbox and Google included were affected
However, to the surprise of many people, the link does not appear to have been broken; and the most experienced users have already been able to verify this, since they have been able to connect to other servers using the IP address. Therefore, everything indicated that it was an Orange DNS problemwhich are used by default in the routers that the company offers to its customers.
Orange Hack
However, it soon became clear that the reason for the loss of connection could be a hacker attack against Orange carried out yesterday morning, which allegedly completely changed the configuration of a significant part of the operator’s connection. Specifically, the alleged hacker allegedly took control of Orange’s RIPE accountchanging the password and preventing company employees from continuing normal network operation.
RIPE is the regional Internet registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia; Located in the Netherlands, this organization is responsible for recording the IP addresses assigned to each operator. It is therefore of the utmost importance that an operator’s network can connect to those of other companies. If the hacker had taken control of Orange’s RIPE account, he would have effectively disconnected Orange’s entire network from the rest of the Internet, because he would not have the correct addresses.
In statements to EL ESPAÑOL – El Androide Libre, Orange confirmed that your RIPE account has suffered “incorrect access” which ended up affecting the browsing of some of its customers. Finally, and after nearly four hours of outages, Orange announced that the service was “practically restored”.
An important detail to highlight is that Orange has confirmed that your customer data has not been compromised, since the alleged attacker did not have access to this type of information from the operator; The compromise of RIPE’s account caused chaos in the operation of its network, but nothing more. The attacker therefore did not have access to the Orange network as such, but rather to the way in which the network connected with the rest of the operators, which caused connectivity problems.
For those of you who have reported to us about issues accessing certain websites, the issue has already been resolved for some customers and we hope to get the rest back soon. Can you tell us here, please? Sorry for the inconvenience.
– Orange Europe (@orange_es) January 3, 2024
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