Hackers took down the internet throughout Andorra, a European principality, to leave the famous Spanish influencers who live there offline, led by El Rubius, AuronPlay and TheGrefg. Youtubers want to discover those responsible.
A cyber attack left the European micro-state of Andorra without internet for 4 days. The target was famous youtubers who live in that country, led by El Rubius (Rubén Doblas Gundersen), AuronPlay (Raúl Álvarez Genes) and TheGrefg (David Cánovas Martínez).
In recent years, it has become a trend for billionaire influencers to move to other countries where they have to pay much less taxesthus increasing your profits.
In the case of the three mentioned streamers, moved their official residence to Andorra, a principality strategically located between Spain and France, where you have to pay less taxes compared to your country of origin. Other well-known Spanish influencers also live there.
This move may be advantageous in other ways, but it has created a new problem: Andorra’s internet network is smaller and much more exposed to cyberattacks.
This has become evident after an onslaught collapsed Andorra Telecom, the only state operator, leaving the country with an intermittent fiber optic and mobile connection between Friday 21 and Monday 24 January.
Problems of this type began four years ago, along with the arrival of youtubers, but they had never reached this scale., indicated the Secretary of State for Digital Transformation of the Government of Andorra, César Marquina, to the Spanish newspaper The country.
“We did not consider that a series of youtubers could generate so much interest in deploying attacks of this volume”, which is causing “internet service degradation among users,” he said.
Andorra’s traffic is usually 35GB per second, but during this incident, hackers pushed it up to 1TB, crashing the system nationwide.
“If we extend the defenses to 1TB, no one tells us that tomorrow we will not receive an attack of 1.2 or 1.4,” said Marquina, adding that they do not have the economic capacity to fight cybercriminals and do not know how to solve it in the long term. .
Youtubers offer reward after cyberattack in Andorra
The influencers El Rubius, AuronPlay y TheGrefg they have not stood idly by and have offered a reward of 10,000 euros (almost 9 million Chilean pesos) for whoever gives them information about the attackers.
El Rubius wrote about the attack in several Twitter messages, where he made jokes such as “I’m asking the neighbor for Wi-Fi, I’ll be right back” and “I’m going to put the router in rice.”
Hackers before: I kick you out of the Call of Duty game
Hackers now: I’m going to take down the internet of an entire country
– elrubius (@ Rubiu5) January 21, 2022
While AuronPlay stated that “by grace or unfortunately you are messing with people who have the financial resources to see this through to the end (…). It is a threat to the law, and when the judge sentences you, then you will cry.