2023-01-04 - Outage of wire.com caused by a DoS attack

Last updated: 2023-01-19

What happened?

On Tuesday, 2023-01-04, the Wire website wire.com was affected by an outage caused by a Denial-of-Service attack. This outage only concerns the wire.com website and none of the services provided by Wire.

What was the impact identified?

Several outages of short periods (7min, 2min, 3min, 4min) have been identified beginning from UTC 05:13.

Are Wire installations affected?

Wire/wire-server was not affected by the wire.com website outage.

Timeline

2023-01-04 05:13: The website monitor triggered an alert on a server issue.
2023-01-04 05:16: The responsible team of the service provider responded and saw an outage for periods of 7 minutes beginning from UTC 05:13, 2 minutes (UTC 05:29), 3 minutes (UTC 05:36) and 4 minutes (UTC 05:43).
2023-01-04/11:34: Wire was informed about an attempted DoS attack on wire.com by the service provider which manually blocked the IP address in the process.
2023-01-04 09:15: Wire started an internal investigation to check whether other systems have been affected, which was not the case.
2023-01-04 14:30: Wire contacted the service provider for more details on the incident as well as the corresponding log files.
2023-01-18 09:53: Wire received the incident report from the service provider.\