UK-based telecommunications company Colt Technology Services is dealing with a cyberattack that has caused a multi-day outage of some of the company’s operations, including hosting and porting services, Colt Online, and Voice API platforms.

The British telecommunications and network services provider disclosed that the attack started on August 12 and the disruption continues as its IT staff works around the clock to mitigate its effects.

Founded in 1992 as City of London Telecommunications (COLT) and acquired by Fidelity Investments in 2015, Colt is a major telecommunications service provider operating in 30 countries across Europe, Asia, and North America. The company employs 75,000 km of fiber networks linking 900 data centers.

Services still offline

Initially, the company announced a “technical issue” without confirming a cyber incident. However, the nature of the event was communicated in subsequent status updates.

The attack forced the firm to take specific systems offline as a protective measure, which affected the operations of support services, including Colt Online and the Voice API platform.

Customer communication through online portals is currently unavailable, and clients are advised to contact Colt by email or phone and expect slower-than-usual responses.

The company underlined that the impacted systems are support services, not the core customer network infrastructure.

As of today, there is no estimation for restoring affected systems and operations.

Colt says it has notified the authorities about the incident without providing any details about the perpetrators or the type of attack.

WarLock claims the attack

A threat actor using the alias ‘cnkjasdfgd’ and claiming to be a member of the WarLock ransomware gang claimed the attack and offered to sell for $200,000 a batch of one million documents allegedly stolen from Colt.

Several data samples have also been published to prove the validity of the files. According to the threat actor, the stolen files include financial, employee, customer, and executive data, internal emails, and software development information.

Although the telecommunications company did not disclose the cause of the breach, security researcher Kevin Beaumont says that the hacker likely managed to gain initial access by exploiting a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint tracked as CVE-2025-53770.

The security issue has been exploited as a zero-day since at least July 18 and is considered critical in severity. Microsoft addressed it in a security update on July 21.

According to Beaumont, the hackers stole a few hundred gigabytes of files with customer data and documentation.

BleepingComputer has contacted Colt to ask for verification of these allegations, and a spokesperson sent us the below comment:

“We’re aware of claims regarding the cyber incident. We are currently investigating these claims.”

“Our technical team is focused on restoring the internal systems impacted by the cyber incident and is working closely with third-party cyber experts. We are grateful for our customers’ understanding as we work towards a resolution to fix the impacted internal systems.” – Colt spokesperson

Update 8/15 – Added comment from Colt

Decentralizing telecommunication networks financially benefits small businesses and telecom corporations alike, according to Frank Mong, the chief operating officer (COO) of Nova Labs, the founding team behind the Helium wireless decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) network.

In an interview with Cointelegraph at Consensus 2025 in Toronto, Canada, Mong said that small businesses including bars, restaurants, convenience stores, and other local operators can generate revenue by hosting wireless hotspots and expanding network coverage.

Large telecommunication companies and service providers can also tap into the Helium Network’s telemetry to reduce operational costs and expand network coverage in dead zones.

“It costs about $300,000 for a telecom company to stand up one tower; you need one per block for 5G to work effectively,” Mong told Cointelegraph, The executive added:

“Instead of doing that and making phone plans more expensive, what if anyone with a useful Wi-Fi network shares that Wi-Fi and allows, not just anyone to use it securely, but allows large companies like AT&T to see the telemetry of that network.”

Decentralized physical infrastructure networks continue to be an example of how blockchain technologies can provide real-world value and make existing infrastructure more resilient to outages, disruptions, censorship, and critical failure.

Related: Countries must add DePIN tokens to their digital asset stockpiles

Helium secures collaborative partnerships with telecom companies

In January 2024, Nova Labs announced a collaborative partnership with Latin American telecommunication company Telefónica to expand the telecom company’s coverage in dead zones and help reduce network congestion.

More recently, in April 2025, Helium partnered with AT&T — a global telecommunication giant — to allow AT&T users automatic access to the Helium Network when in range of the network’s coverage area of mobile hotspots.

Data from the Helium Network shows that the United States currently has the highest concentration of the network’s 95,272 mobile hotspots. Additionally, Helium has 284,053 active Internet of Things (IoT) hotspots worldwide.

“Ultimately, what we did in the United States and Mexico should be global,” Mong told Cointelegraph.

Nova Labs is currently focused on expanding coverage through securing collaborative partnerships with telecommunication infrastructure providers in new regions, the executive added.

Magazine: Most DePIN projects barely even use blockchain: True or false?

A telecom giant is offering 25 million people free SIM cards after a massive hack left its customers’ sensitive personal information at risk.

SK Telecom, the largest mobile provider in South Korea, acknowledged in a security notice that its customers’ personal data was exposed during a malware attack on the company.

The company said in an announcement last month that “no cases of misuse of the information have been confirmed to date.” However, local publication Korea JoongAng Daily is reporting that some of SK Telecom’s customers have discovered money stolen from their bank accounts after the hacking incident.

Police reportedly said that three days after the hack, a man had learned that his mobile plan with SK Telecom had suddenly been cancelled, and he was told by company employees at a service center that someone had signed up for a budget plan with another provider using his name.

Soon thereafter, the man discovered that 50 million Korean won – about $34,000 – had been stolen from his bank account by unknown people in five separate transactions. He then called the police and asked his bank to freeze his account.

Victims of the hack have formed an organization seeking collective action against SK Telecom, and are demanding a full investigation into the attack.

The group, dubbed the “SKT USIM Hacking Joint Response,” told Korea JoongAng Daily that they believe the worse is still yet to come from the data breach, and that the telecom giant’s reaction to the mishap has been underwhelming.

“The leaked information could lead to serious secondary damage across financial, social networking and other services that rely on mobile phone number authentication… SK Telecom’s response has been extremely insufficient.

The scope and extent of the damage have not been clearly revealed, which has amplified user anxiety and confusion.”

SK Telecom subsequently offered free SIM cards for all 25 million customers.

However, the company now says it’s only able to get ahold of 6 million SIM cards for the entire month of May, meaning that it will take some time for it to follow through on its compensation plan.

Says the company in an update,

“[SK Telecom] currently has 1 million SIMs and plans to secure 5 million more SIMs by the end of May. However, since many customers are coming at once and waiting times are expected to be long, please check in advance through the online reservation application system.”

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The following is a guest post from Sofia Bobrik, CEO and Co-founder at TechWaves PR.

Latin America is a tough market for the region’s telcos and their customers. From indebted operators, falling revenues, and counterproductive incentives to unaffordable tariffs, low service quality, as well as a gap in connectivity and demand, the LATAM telecom industry must undergo a substantial transformation to become financially sustainable for participants.

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePINs) are capable of tackling these challenges and fostering the sector’s much-needed evolution with a distributed and resilient infrastructure facilitating scalable, reliable, and affordable telecom solutions across LATAM and beyond.

A struggling telecom market

Despite internet penetration rising from 46% in 2013 to 81% by 2023 in Latin America and the Caribbean, the region’s telecom industry faces unique problems that make it less sustainable and competitive than in Europe, North America, or Asia.

First, a gap in coverage impacts 7% of the region’s population, which is mostly concentrated in remote locations with complex terrains—like Columbia’s mountainous regions—where it is not financially viable for mobile network operators to expand their services. But there’s also a usage gap affecting 28% of Latin Americans, who don’t access telcos’ solutions despite residing in areas with active mobile broadband coverage.

In Argentina, the coverage gap affects 4% while the usage gap is 23%. On the other hand, just 66% of Brazil’s population has access to mobile broadband services, with 12% and 23% struggling with the connectivity and usage gaps, respectively.

One of the main reasons for this usage gap is telecom services’ lack of affordability, caused primarily by infrastructural challenges, CapEx-heavy expansions, indebted regional operators, and regulatory challenges. In countries like Argentina, taxes significantly increase broadband costs, with up to 44.5% of the price attributed to taxes. While fixed internet prices have dropped in Buenos Aires since 2018, they still make up 4% of the average household income, which is the double of the UN’s 2% affordability threshold.

DePIN’s transformative effects for LATAM telecom

DePIN leverages the blockchain to decentralize physical telecom infrastructure ownership and control. Currently, the sector’s total addressable market stands at an estimated $2.2 trillion, which is projected to reach $3.5 trillion by 2028.

With DePIN technology, a decentralized telecom infrastructure can be established where individuals and small businesses set up hotspots, antennas, or routers to provide internet users with coverage. For their valuable contributions to the ecosystem, operators are rewarded with native token payments backed by network usage fees.

For Latin America’s indebted telecom providers, DePIN’s primary advantage is that it doesn’t cost them additional OpEx or CapEx to offload traffic from their networks. They don’t have to spend funds on hardware deployment or maintenance either, as DePIN infrastructures are crowdsourced.

Instead of competition, collaboration makes the greatest sense between DePIN networks and telcos in the LATAM market. As DePINs still have much room for growth, they can tap into the established telecom infrastructures of traditional providers to offer their users coverage at a fraction of the costs of legacy services. This provides telecoms with an additional source of revenue, which could help offset their operational expenses.

With crowdsourced hardware and the right token incentives, DePIN networks can fill coverage gaps in remote locations and areas with complex terrains across Latin America. Since this infrastructure development is drastically cheaper than telcos’ CapEx-heavy expansions, DePINs can offer telecom services in underserved regions at affordable prices. Thus, they also address the LATAM market’s usage gap, potentially bringing 28% of the population online.

Through collaboration, DePINs and telcos can create an interconnected network of telecom solutions offering customers affordable prices, more reliable services, and enhanced coverage. In fact, blending an established infrastructure in major locations and a decentralized ecosystem with capabilities to expand rapidly in remote areas can substantially improve service quality and decrease outage frequency.

While token incentives accelerate DePIN infrastructure development, the blockchain’s distributed, decentralized, and immutable nature makes the network more resilient. Unlike conventional telcos, DePINs lack the single points of failure attackers could exploit in data breaches. This could make the Latin American telecom market significantly more attractive for clients.

A real-world example of implementing DePIN principles is OpenRoaming, a worldwide federation enabling seamless Wi-Fi connectivity on the globe with decentralized identity management and secure and automatic connections. The OpenRoaming ecosystem is upgraded by Uplink, an internet DePIN provider, by bridging members into a decentralized platform to solve their connectivity problems. It is an expansive and scalable approach, fostering the extension of coverage to underserved areas. As the company states on its official website, Uplink’s approach also helps telcos decrease their CapEx and OpEx by offloading traffic into its decentralized infrastructure.

The challenges and future of Latin American DePIN adoption

Each LATAM nation’s regulatory policy varies, complicating operations for both telcos and DePINs. Industry players must collaborate with governments to create robust frameworks that foster growth and innovation.

Another barrier for DePINs is actually onboarding Latin American telcos operating within the Web2 framework to the Web3 market. It is a new sector underpinned by transformative technologies, and legacy providers need a straightforward process to join this new market. 

Considering the financial struggles of Latin America’s population, telcos, and national economies, DePIN has an even more significant potential in the region than in more developed areas. With the right incentives and regulatory frameworks, DePIN could transform Latin America’s telecom sector into a competitive, innovative, and accessible market.