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New research by a top telecommunications company has revealed that more than 600,000 internet routers were rendered useless by an enormous cyber attack.
Knewz.com has learned that the hacker group responsible for the damages to these devices remains unidentified.
This revelation was made by security researchers from Lumen Technologies.
According to the telecommunications company's blog post, the attack happened in November 2023 and took more than 600,000 routers offline.
Lumen’s research team discovered the attackers installed malicious software that interrupted internet access between October 25 and 27–the effects of which were experienced mostly in the Midwest.
The malware was disguised as device updates and when installed removed pertinent sections of the router’s “operational code,” rendering them useless.
“We assess with high confidence that the malicious firmware update was a deliberate act intended to cause an outage,” Lumen’s report stated.
“Destructive attacks of this nature are highly concerning, especially so in this case,” the report continued.
While the problem abated after three days, the malicious software continued to circulate on the web for months.
Lumen did not confirm the brand or company affected by the criminal elements but Reuters identified one particular internet service provider (ISP) that suffered outages on the dates specified by Lumen.
According to Reuters, this company was Windstream based in Arkansas. As a nod to the latter, self-proclaimed users took to Reddit to complain about a strange outage around the same period specified by Lumen.
Some clients claimed that Windstream eventually told them to return the damaged routers as they were unable to rectify the issue remotely.
According to another Redditor, it was not the first time the ISP suffered a malicious attack. Subreddit r/Windstream posted “Windstream got hacked again” at the beginning of 2024.
According to this netizen they “Just got reset [...] everything.” Another user confirmed the regularity of these incidents when they wrote:
“Same thing that happened last time, had notifications reset Windstream password and wrong password notifications on social media sites”
Reuters has since reached out to Windstream but received no comment. The wire service then turned to the National Security Agency and Homeland Security for answers but was referred to the FBI
The FBI, like Windstream, refused to comment.
Lumen noted that such an attack could threaten many aspects of daily life, especially in the large rural swathes of the Midwest.
It wrote in its blog post that “a sizeable portion of this ISP’s service area covers rural or underserved communities; places where residents may have lost access to emergency services, farming concerns may have lost critical information from remote monitoring of crops during the harvest, and health care providers cut off from telehealth or patients’ records.”
The telecommunications company also noted that “recovery from any supply chain disruption takes longer in isolated or vulnerable communities.”