I was sort of responsible for the massive internet outage that happened 4 years ago in NZ

New Zealand, 2nd Sept 2021

No, I’m not saying I’m Mr. Robot.

I was a stupid 18 year old playing around with some Kali Linux software.

It’s a cheap, annoying trick I’d used a few times before. It’s more commonly known as DoS (Denial of Service), very different and often confused with the well-known DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service).

One night, I wrote a script that ran this software in a loop, targeting an unsuspecting neighbor. A few minutes later, my internet died.

Not just my internet. Most of the country.

Quoting from Stuff NZ – During lockdown, Vocus NZ initially reported a DDoS attack on their network, but later clarified it was actually a DoS attack on one of their customers.

Essentially, my localized DoS attack was mistaken by Vocus for a DDoS, prompting them to deploy a mitigation rule that was misconfigured from the start. Online banking, card payments, general internet use were all down, simply because their mitigation plan had ‘bugs’. Vocus kept a lot of details to themselves.

I’m roughly a year away from completing my Bachelor of Computer Science degree, with a major focus on cybersecurity. I hope to improve cybersecurity here in New Zealand, it’s honestly still pretty underdeveloped in some areas.