To combat torrent traffic, a South Korean ISP deployed a bold strategy: Infecting 600,000 of its own customers with malware

We are certainly not strangers to the Machiavellian schemes of telecommunications companies in the US, where thanks to the Restoring Net NeutralityIt's only recently that we've been able to avoid the nightmare of ISPs having the legal ability to throttle their competitors' traffic. That makes it all the more impressive that companies elsewhere in the world are overshadowing our ongoing advances in corporate betrayal, such as KT, a South Korean ISP recently accused of inflicting malware on 600,000 of its own customers.

According to a report by Korean news agency JTBCIn 2020, users of torrent-based “webhard” services (file transfer and storage platforms popular in South Korea) began reporting that they were experiencing slow transfers, corrupted files, and malfunctioning computers. When one of the webhard providers noticed that all of the users experiencing problems were KT customers, the company reported the information to Korean authorities.

ISPs have been waging a war on torrent traffic for years. In the United States, before those years when the FCC decided to try its luck without net neutrality (it didn't work out), Comcast won a cease and desist order in 2008 after limiting BitTorrent transfers. Legal protections and advances in networking have caused those efforts to subside somewhat in recent years, making it all the more outlandish that Korean police found evidence suggesting KT was distributing malware to its own customers as punishment for using P2P services.

TO JTBC Follow-up Report The article describes how, following a search of KT's headquarters, it appears that the ISP had assembled a team to develop and distribute malware, supposedly "listening" to data exchanged between KT subscribers accessing webhard services and interfering with their transfers. While it's difficult to parse out the confirmed details without any English-language reporting from JTBC, it appears that KT's explanation for its malware task force is that the team was an attempt to control what it considered "malicious services" and that there were only a few people involved, so who can really be blamed?

According to the police investigation, the anti-malware squad's operation allegedly followed internal discussions at KT about minimizing current network costs and involved dozens of devices, calling into question how isolated the operation was within the company. I'm no expert, but if I were, I might have tried some IP bans.

To combat torrent traffic, a South Korean ISP deployed a bold strategy: Infecting 600,000 of its own customers with malware

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