US ISP Goes Down As Two Malware Families Go To War Over Its Modems (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Bleeping Computer: Two malware families battling for turf are most likely the cause of an outage suffered by Californian ISP Sierra Tel at the beginning of the month, on April 10. The attack, which the company claimed was a "malicious hacking event," was the work of BrickerBot, an IoT malware family that bricks unsecured IoT and networking devices. "BrickerBot was active on the Sierra Tel network at the time their customers reported issues," Janit0r told Bleeping Computer in an email, "but their modems had also just been mass-infected with malware, so it's possible some of the network problems were caused by this concomitant activity." The crook, going by Janit0r, tried to pin some of the blame on Mirai, but all the clues point to BrickerBot, as Sierra Tel had to replace bricked modems altogether, or ask customers to bring in their modems at their offices to have them reset and reinstalled. Mirai brought down over 900,000 Deutsche Telekom modems last year, but that outage was fixed within hours with a firmware update. All the Sierra Tel modems bricked in this incident were Zyxel HN-51 models, and it took Sierra Tel almost two weeks to fix all bricked devices.

Comments

Bricked or not?

[Nkwe]

From the summary

All the Sierra Tel modems bricked in this incident were Zyxel HN-51 models, and it took Sierra Tel almost two weeks to fix all bricked devices.

If the bricked devices were fixed, then they really were not bricked.

Have you modified your toaster yet?

[Overzeetop]

1) I was unaware that website currently require that you manually execute each script

2) Show me a commercial OS with a supplied browser that includes a good adblocker and a NoScript installed and properly configured by default.

Computers are basically appliances for 80% of the users on the internet now. I can mod my toaster and replace the plug with a grounded type, and only plug it into a GFCI outlet to reduce the risk of shock, but everybody else just plugs theirs in and makes toast. Until OS makers start putting actual, safe browsers on their products, instead of the two-bare-wires versions they currently include, the problem isn't actually with the users. It's with the negligent programmers.