Korean company seeks to combat torrent trafficking

In the world of technology there are always certain risks, since there is always someone who puts some kind of malware in programs or files that people find impossible to download, and that is something that no longer generates confidence when making payments or downloading shared content. This is normally done by hackers, but recently the opposite has happened, as an official company has done its thing to infect its own money-makers.

A South Korean Internet Service Provider (ISP), KTimplemented a radical and controversial strategy to curb torrent use among its customers: infecting 600,000 of them with malware, as strange as that may sound. 2020users of torrent-based “webhard” services experienced problems such as slow transfers, corrupted files, and PC crashes. Following an investigation, one provider notified authorities that all those affected were customers of KT.

KT formed a team dedicated to developing and distributing malware with the purpose of intercepting the data of its subscribers who used webhard services. They justified that the intention was to control “malicious services”, not to infect all of their users. This generated controversy over cost minimization, affecting dozens of devices and compromising the company’s security, the police found evidence that it was distributed as punishment for the use of P2P services, a common practice on platforms such as Steam.