UK Homes Lose Internet Access After Cyber-Attack (theguardian.com)

More than 100,000 people in the UK have had their internet access cut after a string of service providers were hit by what is believed to be a coordinated cyber-attack, taking the number affected in Europe up to about a million. From a report on The Guardian, shared by reader JoshTops: TalkTalk, one of Britain's biggest service providers, the Post Office and the Hull-based KCom were all affected by the malware known as the Mirai worm, which is spread via compromised computers. The Post Office said 100,000 customers had experienced problems since the attack began on Sunday and KCom put its figure at about 10,000 customers since Saturday. Earlier this week, Germany's Deutsche Telekom said up to 900,000 of its customers had lost their internet connection as part of the same incident.

Comments

Oh no

[110010001000]

In related news, productivity of workers in the UK was up 455% today.

Re:Oh no

[caferace]

Unless of course, you're a 'net based company.

Re:Oh no

[mjwx]

In related news, productivity of workers in the UK was up 455% today.

Not if you were working from home. BTW, internet is fine here in Surrey, No shortage of cat videos.

Re:Oh no

[s.petry]

Curse or hate the Russians? I'm so confused....

Re:Oh no

[antdude]

Not for those who needs the Internet like work from home people!

New Normal

[DumbSwede]

Get use to the new normal. It may get harder and harder to use the internet as bad actors (whether criminal or State) adopt AI to compromise systems. Of course we will use AI to protect systems, but this is probably an asymmetrical fight. What use are captchas or security questions if a basic enough AI can pose as a human and has enough background information to draw from? I don’t know whether the coming AI proxy wars will speed AI development, or slow it down as the internet grinds to a halt.

Re:New Normal

[110010001000]

AI? You are funny. We can barely get basic software to work right.

Re:New Normal

[volodymyrbiryuk]

Routers issued by Telekom are crap, hence easy to attack. The attack wasn't as sophisticated as it sounds. But it is also a lack of consumer awareness of cyber security that leads to a lot of attacks being successful.

Re:New Normal

[Zocalo]

What's new about it? This is the same FUBAR cluelessness we should be used by now from large consumer ISPs like TalkTalk (who also run the Post Office ISP network), although I thought KCom knew better - maybe they've lost the cluefullness they had when they first set up and were at the cutting edge of high-speed broadband. The only reason this was a problem for them was because they thought it was a good idea to provide their customers with routers with the remote admin ports active and exposed to the Internet at large. Now, the first part of that (the remote admin) is fair enough; we are talking mass-market consumer ISPs here, so being able to remotely push firmware and other updates out to the CPE is generally a good idea, but just *how* long has it been best current practice to restrict access to admin ports to known and trusted IPs again? Defence in depth stuff like that was the "done thing" back when I was working at an ISP in early 2000s, FFS. It's not hard, and there are multiple implementation options; you can do so in your internal distribution network somewhere, you can do it on the edge, by pushing out some sane rules to the devices internal firewall, or (better still) a combination of more than one of the above, but there's simply no excuse for not doing it at all, especially after the last decade and change of major Internet worms.

Re:New Normal

[volodymyrbiryuk]

Agree. And as I said before, in the case of Telekom their router are real garbage. I don't know what model KCom uses though. It's a tradeoff between comfort and security and the ISPs opt for comfort.

Re:New Normal

[CaptainDork]

... consumer awareness ...

That's like saying consumers should be up on current events by intuition, with no need for news sites.

All this shit is computers. Computers should be hardened against this simple crap.

The answer is to prevent this from happening in the first place.

I'd suggest a botnet scanner that gives a heads up about open doors and the presence of malware signatures.

Manufacturers should force password change, or halt installation.

I like the equipment that ships with random username/password on the bottom that can't be changed.

It's a cyberattack on the UK ... by the UK.

[tlambert]

It's a cyberattack on the UK ... by the UK.

The computers in question were obviously part of the Avalanche Botnet.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/...

Re:TalkTalk

[coofercat]

Exactly - TalkTalk are right down the bottom of the list. They spend their money on X Factor advertising rather than considering to maybe offer decent service.

We have a lot of choice of providers here in the UK. The biggest providers are almost always the least good ones, and switching is pretty easy (not quite easy enough, but it's not too hard). TalkTalk doesn't even have 'other offerings' that might get you to stay If you're a BT, Sky or VirginMedia customer you might think twice about switching because it might affect your TV service, but that's not an issue with TalkTalk. There's literally no reason to be their customer if they've pissed you off more than once.

Re:TalkTalk

[Shimbo]

The trouble is that the biggest providers like TalkTalk keep buying out the smaller providers who suck less. It's a chore to swap, especially if you made the mistake of using your ISP provided e-mail address.