An ISP installed malware on 600,000 customers to block Torrent files

Internet providers fight against P2P file sharing in different ways. To the point of infecting their clients with viruses.

The shocking news has occurred in South Korea. The Internet Provider (ISP) Korea Telecom has been charged by the police with infect the computers of 600,000 clients with malware, to block or slow down the use of Torrent files.

The Torrent files They are used as an “address book” to exchange all types of content between users. In most cases, Pirated movies, music and video gamesalthough they also have a legal use.

For Internet providers it is a problem, because much of this content occupies dozens of gigabytes, consuming a lot of bandwidth, which produces slowdowns and jams in their network.

This is how the Internet provider that used malware acted

For decades, ISPs have fought against P2P file sharing, limiting traffic. If you use BitTorrent you have surely noticed that, suddenly, the speed of your Internet connection plummets.

But this is getting rarer. Torrent file usage has declined in recent years, and providers’ bandwidth has improved dramatically, so they don’t need to slow down BitTorrent. Nowadays, the one who “eats” the bandwidth is Netflix and the rest of the streaming services.

In South Korea, however, it is different. P2P exchange is very popular there, although it works a little differently. According to account TorrentFreakthere exists what they call services webhardwhich are paid hard drives that store millions of pirated files that are exchanged by BitTorrent, so that there are always seeds or seeds.

As explained by the police, the objective of the Internet provider Korea Telecom (KP), with more than 16 million customers, was destroy or disable computers webhardso that its users could not use the Torrent files.

So created malware that installed on the PCs of 600,000 customersattacking those node computers, slowing down their use and generating error messages on their clients’ PCs, when they exchanged files with BitTorrent.

K.P. has recognized the factsbut ensures that Its only intention was to balance traffic to maintain the fluidity of data for all its clients. Infecting your clients’ computers with malware does not seem like the most ethical way to do it… It is a serious crime, and carries prison sentences.

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Tags: BitTorrent, P2P, Viral, Torrents, Curiosities