South Korean telecom company attacks torrent users with malware
A South Korean telecom company infected 600,000 users with malware to block torrent services, causing file loss and PC issues. Investigations led to 13 charged individuals. KT faced backlash for unauthorized actions.
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A South Korean telecom company, KT Corporation, intentionally infected over 600,000 users with malware to prevent them from using torrent services, specifically targeting users of Webhard's Grid Program. The malware caused missing files, strange folders, and disabled PCs for affected customers. Investigations revealed that only KT users were impacted, leading to suspicions of a hacking attack. Authorities found evidence linking the malware distribution to KT's data center and have charged 13 individuals involved in the attack. The company defended its actions as necessary to control a malicious program but faced backlash for installing malware without user consent. The incident stemmed from a dispute between Webhard and KT over network usage fees and service details, with the judiciary ruling in favor of KT prior to the malware distribution. Despite the legal ruling, KT's decision to deploy malware on customers' devices resulted in significant disruptions and damage, prompting criticism and calls for accountability.
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20 commentsMakes me wonder where this myth of "good Korean internet" even came from if everything ends up so bandwidth constrained. Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency?
I hope everyone involved in this catches criminal charges, all the way up the chain. Completely unacceptable behavior.
I'm actually very impressed. If this happened in the US, the police wouldn't care about it at all, and would just tell everyone affected that "it's a civil matter" and they'll have to file a lawsuit if they don't like it.
Note that KT, while relatively recently privatized, is still a national corporation that is considered a critical national asset under the law (thus if the North attacks, KT towers are first priority to be protected by the South's military). So, it is not as if some rogue SME infected its users with malware; it's a national corporation infecting its users over and not even be sorry about it (as in the article).
Plenty of other comments detail the strange Active X requirement: The national law had dependency on Internet Explorer/Active X. (I do not know of any developed nation having a national legal dependency on a specific corporation's consumer technology at this scale.) Also, many comments on South Korea's purportedly great infrastructure (albeit two decades ago). There is more to this.
Interestingly, if you ask an average Korean, he would say Korea is literally the best nation in IT/internet technology, topping or at least on par with the US. The national propaganda effort that went into forming this collective conscious should not be understated. Even many of the top programmers in South Korea I met strongly believe in this superiority. I wonder if this strong sense of superiority is both (1) preventing SK from improving its actually-lagging tech and (2) act in Dostoevskian-Raskolnikov manners thinking that it is above the law and consensus ("the best can break the rules and set new ones"). Whatever the underlying reason may be, there is a serious techno-cultural issue going on in the country.
One of the biggest banks in South Korea blacklisted Amazon as a financial scammer because it's Prime subscription renews monthly and customers complained after seeing the renewal charge on their credit cards. The ban was national -- no customer of this bank could buy a product from Amazon unless he calls the bank personally and ask the charge to be approved. Again, the issue wasn't technical. It was cultural.
Edit: While looking for an answer, I ran across this article. Apparently they've been fighting for a while (2015):
Project is now being nationalised as kt: - didn't pay subcontractors. Many of them went bankrupt - offered prices so large, that other isps would rather create their own infra than use theirs - abandon the project totally Of course i shouldn't put this under KT's name, as they used a subcompany - SungGwang - for all the dirty stuff.
So, fast forward: we laid a new infra parallel to this one in many cases and that one lays in the ground and rots.
For context, the legal situation of network usage in South Korea is something akin to Ajit Pai's wet dream. Network operators are legally empowered to charge troll tolls on both ends of any connection they want. Infrastructure costs are to be borne by literally anyone BUT the network operators.
To compound this, South Korea is economically an authoritarian hellscape. Large megacorporations[0] own everything and the government is just a clearinghouse and mediator for their interests. Corruption is so rampant that even administrations run by ardent anti-corruption activists wind up being toppled by rampant and widespread corruption.
I guarantee you that not one SK Telecom executive will spend time behind bars for this blatantly illegal conduct. Anyone with the power to put people behind bars in South Korea will be unmade if they touch a chaebol.
[0] These are specifically called chaebols and the group includes LG, Hyundai, Samsung, Lotte, and a few others. Japan used to have something similar, but they ate their rich... and then brutally invaded and colonized half of East Asia.
They are scanning SNI field and manipulate packet to prevent user visit certain sites.
Huh? The users are paying for their network, so they should be free to do with it as they wish. How is Webhard involved in this discussion? This is something the ISP may wish to discuss with its users, if the ISP feels the users are consuming more than they paid for.
Good luck to the believers that someone there will be punished for this. For everyone else, switch to encrypted protocols.
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