Orange Spain impacted with Internet outage after their RIPE Account got hacked

Customers of Orange Spain experienced internet outages on January 3 due to a hacker, using the alias 'Snow', compromising the company's account with RIPE NCC (Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Center) - the regional internet registry for Europe and parts of Central Asia.

The hacker altered Orange's RIPE account settings, causing disruptions in Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing.

Hudson Rock, a threat intelligence company, suspects the breach occurred after an Orange employee's computer, infected with Raccoon information stealer malware in September, leaked RIPE admin account credentials.

While the hacker stated their intention was to prevent a serious breach and did not demand a ransom, the incident led to Orange Spain confirming the hijack and restoration of affected services without any customer data compromise.

RIPE NCC has initiated an investigation, restored account access to Orange, and advised all account holders to update their passwords and enable multi-factor authentication.