MURRAY — Internet service to thousands of residents was maliciously disrupted over the holiday weekend in an attempt to extort a ransom from a local internet service provider.
The so-called distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack was launched against Sumo Fiber starting last Friday and lasting until early Monday. The technique attempts to slow and/or disrupt the functions of an online service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of internet traffic.
Sumo is one of almost a dozen internet service providers available on the Utopia fiber network, which serves some 25,000 residential customers in Utah. Sumo President David Burr said the unknown malefactor(s) demanded money to halt the attack, but the company chose to fight back instead.
"They demanded $750 in bitcoin." Burr wrote in an email to the Deseret News. "I was told by several people never to pay. Once they know you pay, they and others will be back over and over again wanting more."
Burr said Sumo customers suffered slowdowns and service disruptions beginning last Friday evening and finally coming to an end around 3 a.m. Monday. Utopia Fiber Executive Director Roger Timmerman said the physical fiber network, upon which Sumo's services run, was not disrupted nor were any of the other providers on the network impacted. He noted it was a particularly aggressive attack.
"DDoS attacks are happening constantly, but this was at a much larger scale than we typically see," Timmerman said. "It takes a pretty sophisticated attack to take down a large website or service like an internet service provider. You have to come at them with a lot of bandwidth."
Timmerman said Sumo's service provision has been very consistent and characterized the size and intensity of the weekend disruption effort as an anomaly.
"They’ve been a very reliable provider," Timmerman said. "Sumo has a good track record for reliability. … This is definitely an outlier for them."
Burr said his 7-year-old company has installed new security software that should help thwart future attempts at malicious disruptions.