According to reports MTN’s Gallo Manor Data Centre in Johannesburg found its services negatively affected by a cyber-attack recently.

The data centre was hit by a series of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks which resulted in disruptions in connectivity services due to a “packet loss on some of its nodes” at the data centre.

A DDOS attack typically involves a number of compromised IT systems flooding a server with requests in a bid to cause a “denial of service”

While MTN has not revealed the source of the attack they assure customers that the situation is under control.

“We have now rapidly implemented mitigation measures and connectivity is fully restored. MTN has also installed new hardware and software to provide protection from future DDOS attacks,” said MTN in a statement.

MTN’s data centres have also been affected in recent weeks by load shedding, when a power spike damaged a number of nodes, causing a cluster in the data centre to fail.

According to Vodacom’s chief technology security officer, Vernon Fryer, cyber-crime in South Africa has seen a significant increase and is on par with many developed countries.

“South Africa is very much the same as Nigeria; we are detecting an increase in botnet traffic and digital ransomware is more mature. Most of the malicious threats are coming from Russia via the US,” Says Fryer.