Angola telco Unitel hacked before IPO
Unitel, Angola's biggest mobile carrier, got hit by a cyberattack hours before its shares started trading on the country's stock exchange. The attack knocked out phone, internet, and text service for customers across the country.
- Report priority
- Medium
- Involves
- Unitel
What is known
Unitel has not disclosed how attackers got in or what specific technique they used, only that it called the incident a deliberate and malicious attack on its technology infrastructure.
What to do
Unitel customers in Angola can watch for continued problems with 4G, 5G, and digital services, since those are still not fully restored as of this writing.
Reported details
Unitel's network goes down at 2:20 am on July 28, the same day the government closes a public share sale on the Angola stock exchange. Voice, mobile data, and internet service stop working across the country. The carrier restores 2G and 3G by July 30 and text messages by July 31, but 4G, 5G, and some digital services still have problems days later.
Unitel has not published technical details of the intrusion vector, payload, or whether data was exfiltrated. The outage pattern (a coordinated, near-simultaneous loss of voice, SMS, mobile data, and internet nationwide, followed by a staged restoration of 2G/3G then SMS while 4G/5G and digital services lagged) is consistent with an attack that hit core network or OSS/BSS infrastructure rather than a single service, but Unitel's own statement stops at calling it a deliberate and malicious cyberattack on its technology infrastructure.