QNet confirmed that E-commerce portal was down due to DDoS attack
QNet has confirmed that its e-commerce portal was recently the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This caused its main website to be offline for over 36 hours.
QI Group IT Director, TG Kintanar said, "As a global direct selling company with a busy trading portal, it is not unusual for QNet to become a target for such attacks, although this has never happened before." QNet is a subsidiary of the QI Group of Companies.
"Let me stress that the cyber-attack on our website was not the work of hackers. The DDoS merely blocked customers' access to our services, causing them great inconvenience. However, as QNet's online security measures were in place, our customer database remained intact throughout the attack. Nothing was compromised." Kintanar said.
He added that upon noticing the attack on March 9, the QNet IT team immediately started working round-the-clock to set up an alternate transactional website so that its customers could continue their business without interruption.
"We deliberately kept our website offline for some time as the volume of these attacks increased substantially and we worked to mitigate them. Hours after the initial attacks began, we were able to restore full functionality to https://www.qnet.net though we restricted access to it.
"Taking a leaf from this experience, we are working with cyber-security experts to further strengthen our systems, ward off future attacks and return to business-as-usual much faster," Kintanar stressed.
In 2009, Facebook confirmed that it too had become a victim of DDoS. However, no user data was at risk and they too restored full access to the site within hours.
A year earlier, in 2008, the CNN News website twice faced a DDoS attack. CNN fixed the attacks by limiting the number of users that could access the site from specific geographical areas.
