Deutsche Telekom hack crashes nearly 1 mln home routers

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http://www.marketwatch.com/story/deutsche-telekom-hack-crashes-nearly-1-mln-routers-2016-11-30

>An attack hit nearly one million home internet routers of Deutsche Telekom AG customers, knocking them offline, the latest in a string of similar events that have revealed vulnerabilities in home devices connected to the internet.

>Deutsche Telekom, which has 20 million fixed line customers, said the attack started Sunday and attempted to infect the routers with malicious software. In about 5% of the routers, the company said, the virus caused the devices to malfunction, interrupting internet service.

>Most of the affected routers were back online as of Tuesday evening, Deutsche Telekom spokesman Stephan Broszio said. The company instructed customers to reboot the machines to download a software patch. It hasn't yet found the culprit.

>The malware used in the attack was a variant of the Mirai code that has been used in other attacks, according to the SANS Institute, a cybersecurity research group.

>Security experts say the Mirai software has infected millions of network routers, digital video recorders and other connected devices around the world in recent months. The code works by exploiting factory-default passwords that most device owners never change. The software then uses its control of the gadgets to flood other websites with junk traffic, a tactic known as a distributed denial of service attack.

>Most device owners never know their machines were enlisted in massive "bot" networks to launch online attacks. That suggests the disruption at Deutsche Telekom came from an infection campaign gone awry.
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