KT, a South Korean telecom giant, installed malware on 600,000 users’ computers to prevent torrent downloads.

Gamingdeputy reported on June 27 that JTBC, a well-known Korean news agency, recently discovered through an in-depth investigation that KT, one of South Korea's telecom giants, deliberately implanted malware into more than 600,000 users in order to prevent users from using torrent services.

The incident started in May 2020, when South Korean cloud service provider Webhard received a large number of user complaints, saying they encountered unexplained program errors. An investigation found that the BitTorrent-based online disk service “Grid Program” used by Webhard was maliciously damaged. An anonymous representative of Webhard said: “We suspect that the online disk service has been hacked, which is very bad and has seriously affected the operation of the program.”

After further investigation, Webhard noticed that all affected users used the Internet service provided by KT. The representative said: “Only KT users encountered problems. The malware created strange folders or hidden files on the user's computer and completely disabled the Webhard program. In some cases, the user's computer was even paralyzed, so we reported it to the police.”

After receiving the report, the police launched an investigation and traced the source of the malware to the KT data center in southern Seoul. South Korean authorities believe that KT's move may have violated South Korea's “Communication Secrets Protection Act” and “Information and Communications Network Act” and other relevant laws. At present, the police have identified and charged 13 relevant personnel, including KT employees and outsourcers who participated in the malware attack last November, but the investigation is still ongoing.

According to reports,KT argued that it implanted malware directly on the computers of customers using the Webhard cloud storage service because the program was malicious and they had no choice but to control it.However, the point is not that Webhard uses the BitTorrent protocol.Instead, it installs malicious software on the user's computer without the user's consent.

Gamingdeputy noted that Webhard and KT had previously had a dispute over the “Grid Program” network disk service. Webhard said that by allowing users to use peer-to-peer services to store and transfer data, billions of won can be saved because there is no need to store data on their own servers. However,A large number of “Grid Program” network disk service users put tremendous pressure on KT's network, and the two companies went to court over this.

The court ultimately ruled in favor of KT. The court held that Webhard did not pay KT's network usage fees for its peer-to-peer system, nor did it explain in detail the operating mechanism of the network disk service to users. Therefore, it was not unreasonable for KT to block Webhard's network traffic.

but,KT did not take conventional measures such as blocking IP addresses, but instead implanted malware on a large number of personal computers of users of the “Grid Program” online disk service.The vast majority of users affected were individuals, not businesses or companies, and they had no idea what was happening.

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