"we are taking steps to review the potential impacts of the Mirai worm"
TalkTalk and Post Office broadband customers were hit by a cyber-attack which took control of their broadband routers.
Over 350,000 TalkTalk and 100,000 Post Office broadband users were victims of malware called the Mirai worm. The computer virus takes control of operating systems like Linux and results in taking services offline.
Attacks started on 27th November 2016 affecting the Post Office broadband users and continued to 1st December impacting the TalkTalk services.
A spokesman for the Post office stated: ‘Post Office can confirm that on November 27 a third party disrupted the services of its broadband customers, which impacted certain types of routers.’ They assured that no personal data was at risk.
A statement from TalkTalk informed customers of the virus attack: ‘Along with other ISPs in the UK and abroad, we are taking steps to review the potential impacts of the Mirai worm.’ Highlighting actions taken it said: ‘A small number of customer routers have been affected, and we have deployed additional network-level controls to further protect our customers.’
The MailOnline was told by TalkTalk that up to 360,000 – could have been affected but there is no confirmation of the final numbers.
The Mirai worm virus was used for a major cyber-attack on German ISP Deutsche Telekom (DT) which knocked off over 900,000 of its customers earlier in November 2016. Customer Internet routers were infected by the worm using remote access features usually used by ISP’s to upgrade firmware on the devices.
It’s likely that the attack on DT was the result of a modified Mirai worm which gets through weaknesses in Internet of Thing devices. Using them collectively to form a botnet for DDoS attacks or crashing the devices.
It was Mirai which was used to attack the ISP Dyn in October 2016 which brought down Twitter, Paypal, Spotify and other sites. On November 15 the same virus was used to knock out a large portion of the country Liberia’s internet infrastructure.
Many TalkTalk customers are not happy at all for the outage caused by the attack.
One customer said: “Talk Talk are in my opinion, the worst company I’ve ever had a contract with.”
Another client said: “As the issue has been ongoing since Sunday at least – and it’s still not fixed – says there’s no priority in getting a fix.”
Security experts believe the attacks are just to cause disruption to services to prove that hackers can cause such havoc and are not related to money or other reasons.
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