One of the largest South Korean ISPs, KT Corporation, deliberately infected the computers of more than 600 thousand users with malware because they used a torrent service . This is shown by the results of a journalistic investigation by the local JTBC television.
The problem came to light in May 2020 when customers flooded Korean cloud service provider Webhard with complaints of unexplained errors. The company discovered that its Grid service, based on the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, had been compromised in a suspected hacking attack.
Further investigation revealed that all the victims had KT as their telecom provider. The malware that infiltrates the provider's users' computers creates strange folders and files that are invisible, disables the Webhard program, and in some cases disables the computer.
Police joined the journalistic investigation and found that the malicious activity originated from a data center owned by KT south of Seoul. According to authorities, the provider has violated applicable laws in South Korea, including the Communications Privacy Protection Act and the Communications Information Act.
To date, 13 people allegedly connected to the incident have been identified and all charged, but the investigation is ongoing. KT admitted that it directly implanted malware into the computers of its customers who used Webhard Grid, because the program itself was, according to its version, malicious and the vendor “had no choice but to take control of it” , reports JTBC.
But the main complaint is not that Webhard introduced the BitTorrent protocol into its service, but that KT installed malware on its customers' computers without their consent. Webhard and KT have previously been in dispute over the Grid service. The former claims to save tens of billions of Korean won by switching users to peer-to-peer data storage and transfer services; the second claimed that the service caused congestion on his networks.
They presented their arguments in court and the court sided with KT: according to them, Webhard did not pay the provider for the implementation of its peer-to-peer system and did not explain to users how it works. Now, however, the stomping ground may be for KT.