South Korean telecom company attacks torrent users with malware — over 600,000 customers report missing files, strange folders, and disabled PCs

25 Comments

  1. KrazyKirby99999

    > According to the news report, KT said it directly planted the malware on its customers that use Webhard’s Grid Service, as it was a malicious program and that “it had no choice but to control it.” However, the main problem here wasn’t Webhard’s use of the BitTorrent protocol but the installation of malware on customer computers without consent.

    How incompetent must you be to think this was a good idea

  2. stonehearthed

    This is why, guys, you should use open source stuff like qBittorrent and download from trusted users.

  3. splendiferous-finch_

    Are there alternatives to this ISP for these customers??

    Because I think there is a way people can stop using filesharing services in **this** service

  4. giratina143

    The files weren’t delivered via the torrent application, but to users who had torrent traffic, they somehow sent it to their systems.

    It’s not possible to infect users using existing torrents, if it was, there wouldn’t be a piracy issue at all.

    This shit ISP didn’t like that people were using P2P service on their network and clogging up their bandwidth. Instead of cutting their connections or sending notice to the company using the torrent software they decided in their infinite wisdom to deploy malware.

    They were mad that the company using the torrent program to distribute its files to its own people wasn’t using their servers and paying for them, so they decided to take revenge.

    Makes you wonder how much damage your ISP can do if they really want to.

  5. splendiferous-finch_

    “Your honor he was mildly stealing from me by over using my services; you can clearly see that I had no other choice but to breaking into his house and beat him bloody. It was the only reasonable response to the financial damage I that was inflected onto me.”

    – CEO of teleco spreading malware to its paying customers

  6. Lumb3rCrack

    then there’s a group that says “we don’t need anti virus, windows defender does the job” while downloading torrents and visiting all kinds if sites and then outta nowhere these cases also exist!

    edit: Some anti-virus guards you against known network attacks and block unknown uploads and downloads.

  7. hurtfulproduct

    I’m getting my popcorn ready for the absolute shit storm that is going to hit them via legal and illegal means and everything in between. . .

  8. ShiroeKurogeri

    Webhard’s lawyer gonna have a field day after this. Tk going for the nuclear option of sending malware while they were winning in court is an absolutely brain dead move.

  9. Can people please read the article first before commenting, it doesn’t matter if you only download from your favourite piracy site (not what the article is talking about) any users of another companies use of the bittorent protocol was decided by the ISP to install malware on their device as they were annoyed that they weren’t paying for their servers instead

    This wasn’t to do with piracy, or downloading from your favourite site, or getting a virus from a dodgy link. Their ISP literally installed malware onto their devices because they used a cloud provider

  10. Donglemaetsro

    The amount of fraud there is off the charts. I suspect because gaming cafes and communication. Used to work on a game and noticed everyone there would buy tons of stuff then ask for refunds because “their kid bought it without permission”

    Our policy was to refund friendly fraud as it’s called no questions asked. I caught that and suggested we change policy and ban their accounts in SK if they do it. No one cared though so they just kept doing it. It was blatant and extreme.

  11. palamulu

    kt? Wow, that’s actually massive, they are huge

  12. Mygaffer

    I don’t know about South Korea but this would definitely be an illegal, criminal act if done in the USA.

    Edit: reading the article it’s definitely an illegal act there and they’ve already charged 13

  13. WHERE_SUPPRESSOR

    SK Telecom gosu plays even outside of SC

  14. cyber_god_odin

    I hope they a get ransomware attack ! calling in my boy Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev !

  15. Desperate-Intern

    Good time to invest into usenet.

    ![gif](giphy|cmQqX4KUt25Mc|downsized)

  16. Oh god they would have been destroyed in the EU

  17. This is pretty wild – and unprecedented? I heard South Korean internet laws are awful for customers but an ISP literally attacking their own users is not something I’ve heard of happening – not even in authoritarian surveillance countries. Frankly I didn’t know this was possible. Now I’m wondering how much power does my ISP have over my computer…

  18. Not sure it’s a good idea to start a fight like this with such a huge crowd. The internet has shown to be pretty vengeful about shitty behavior from corporations.

  19. usernametaken0x

    This is how copilot is going to work. Anything it believes is “piracy”, will be flagged and it will mess with the files (corrupt them or delete them). The biggest problem, is false positives. AI has a hallucination problem, and when that problem can and will lead to your files being corrupted and deleted, is a huge problem. Now maybe M$ takes the lightest possible approach, and only does this when they are 100% certain its a pirated file, but ehh, i doubt it.

    Remember like 4 years ago, microsoft partnered with an anti-piracy company.

  20. TheDuke2031

    Isn’t South Korea like cyberpunk 2077?

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