ISP Plants Malware into Its Customers' PCs to Fight Torrents

Torrent lovers in South Korea faced uncomfortable limitations from where they didn't expect. No wonder, ISPs usually try to provide the best quality possible to attract clients, not infect them with malware, but this is exactly what the Korean company KT did.

According to JTBC (via PC Gamer), KT planted the malware on 600,000 of its customers' computers as some sort of punishment for them using torrents.

Back in 2020, users of torrent-based "webhard" services – file storage and transfer platforms – complained about slow speed, broken files, and malfunctioning PCs. One of the webhard providers noticed that, interestingly, it's only KT clients who experienced these issues and reported it to the police, which found evidence of the misconduct.

A JTBC report says that KT formed a group of workers who would spread this modern ailment, wiretapping data and messing with transfers. The ISP's executives allegedly view torrents as malware itself and decided to "fight" it in this bizarre way. This whole operation was presumably meant to reduce networking costs, but I don't think KT expected this result.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. In 2007, American Comcast was caught throttling BitTorrent traffic to complicate seeding a download, although it tried to deny it.

This makes me wonder if my provider is tampering with data. Find the original article here and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.