Vodafone says it may never know why it was target of cyber-attack

Vodafone Portugal said in an open letter published in the media on Friday it does not know and may never know the reason for the cyberattack it suffered, which shut down “schools, hospitals and fire stations”.

The telecommunications operator led by Mário Vaz said that it experienced a blackout on February 7.

“They switched off schools, hospitals and fire stations, businesses, families, people, they switched off the lives of millions of Portuguese,” Vodafone pointed out.

“We don’t know, and perhaps we never will, why. Perhaps the idea that they could destroy what we are, what we work and build every day, with employees, customers, partners, the State and civil society,” it continues.

“We know that technology has astronomical power, but what distinguishes us is what we do with it,” he stressed, adding that, for Vodaphone, this “will always be at the service of good”.

“We will always be on the right side. This is the force that you will never be able to erase,” the operator said in its open letter.

In this unprecedented attack, Vodafone was confronted, around 21:00 on 7 February “with an abrupt interruption of almost all” its communications services, except for the fixed Internet service and an “expressive part of television customers”, said the operator’s chief executive, Mário Vaz, in a press conference the following day.

“To get an idea of the size and the objective of this attack was clearly to make our network unavailable and with a level of severity to make it as difficult as possible to recover the services,” the manager stressed at the time.

The operator has said that there is no evidence that customer data has been accessed or compromised.