Toowoomba-based telecommunications company Maxotel, which boasts more than 50,000 users throughout Australia, has been sabotaged by hackers leaving its business customers without phone lines.
The growing Harristown-headquartered company has been the victim of a denial-of-service attack that has been plaguing its customers for more than three days but Maxotel is not commenting to the media about the attack.
A denial-of-service attack is a cyberattack that floods networks with traffic, requests, or other malicious activity. The attacks lead to targets systems, like Maxotel, to become slow, unresponsive, or completely unavailable.
The attack has some Toowoomba businesses without the use of their phones for three days.
One business owner said Maxotel had not provided any warning about the problems until Wednesday morning, more than two days after the problems started.
The business owner said the portal that they could use to divert phone numbers had also been out of action for two days, leaving businesses with no phone lines.
In an email to customers Maxotel says it is aware of the denial-of-service attack.
“Our technical teams are actively engaged in mitigation efforts and are collaborating with our upstream providers to implement a permanent resolution,’’ the company said.
“We are monitoring the situation closely and will provide further updates as necessary.
“Customers connecting to us from Aussie Broadband, MaxoNBN or Vonex Broadband connections may experience degraded audio quality.
“Customers connecting to us from all other providers may experience phone registration failures, call failures or degraded audio quality.”
As well as operating under its own brand, Maxotel owns a controlling stake in ASX-listed telecommunications company Vonex Limited.
Maxotel gained a controlling stake in Vonex in December 2024 after a hostile battle with rival Swoop and in February it had snapped up more than 60 per cent of the company.
In June Maxotel said it had entered into a Scheme Implementation Deed to acquire 100% of the shares in Vonex, valuing the company at $34.4 million.
Toowoomba Minute contacted Maxotel for comment but a company representative declined to comment.
