South Korean telecom company attacks torrent users with malware
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
Makes me wonder where this myth of "good Korean internet" even came from if everything ends up so bandwidth constrained. Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency?
I hope everyone involved in this catches criminal charges, all the way up the chain. Completely unacceptable behavior.
15-20 years ago Chinese banking website did exactly same things. Maybe they got the idea from SK, don't know. It only ended with widespread adoption of mobile phones and Chrome.
To this day many banks won't allow all operations from the online interface.
It is not a myth! A decade ago, though. I would still consider it is "good" in terms of objective metrics, but other countries have since caught up.
> Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency?
No, because it would only apply to a quarter of the entire population of South Korea if it were true.
That was, I think, about twenty years ago.
I've been living in the US for 10+ years so I'm not very well informed, but basically the ISP industry ended up in an oligopoly where everybody's friends with the government, and they kept raising prices while neglecting infra upgrade. Until nobody can call Korea's internet "fast" any more.
Now all we've got is shitty websites. (To be fair, they are somewhat less shitty now... you can now access your banking websites on Mac!)
I stopped when my cousin told me it was illegal
Have a lot of fond memories when there was a mini mmorpg bubble in korea
N-age still going strong it seems in 2024 ! So many rare unique korean mmorpg that will never see the light of the day!
Then the cheating got out of hand so they added some anti-cheat software, and shortly after they wanted people to verify their identity by sending a scan of their id/passport. This is when 99% of players left.
I know of one place where there is zero spam and it’s because of the identity vetting infrastructure.
Even source codes were stolen and Chinese mmorpgs would appear with the exact same gameplay but different skins and names.
Wild times.
Eventually was made illegal and what ended up happening was a huge korean social security numbers being traded online in Chinese forums (who had economic incentives to farm, hack, cheat items from korean mmorpgs)
Some of the fastest pirate FTP sites in the world were .kr at the time, it was crazy seeing 125MB/sec inter-site transfers back then.
The ops must've set the machines up with a /dev/shm ramdisk or similar for uploads. There were no SSDs those days, so no way to even write at 125MB/sec, unless you had an unreasonably large Raid-0 array of WD Raptor HDDs, also possible.
And the reality today is that it'll seem practically backwards to a Westerner - i.e. tons of paper forms and bureaucracy for things like banking and rental applications.
There was a bunch of infrastructure and services provided by the actual phone company NTT DoCoMo (as opposed to generally over the Internet) that let people watch shows, play games, shop, etc.. all on their mobile devices. Stuff that we do now every day, but this was almost 20 years ago.
They also had phones built for this purpose, like ones that had rotating screens that went into landscape mode (imagine holding a "T"-shaped device) for watching TV..
So it certainly felt like they were ahead, but you're right, it was a very different approach with everything coming from the phone company itself, and one that wasn't set up to stay competitive or stay ahead..
It will not seem backwards to a "Westerner" today. The only place where you'd really encounter forms as a human being is in government interactions (and possibly banking), which is not unusual or even particularly backwards.
Looks like the major ISP and some cloud service provider are having some kind of ridiculous fight, and they're using their customers' computers as the battlefield. I'd be pretty disgusted if I were a customer.
It's pretty interesting when coming from the west where all the problems are often spoken about in the open. I mean the great American past time is complaining about the government. But in SK there's a lot more trust of the government and similarly, a lot more control by them. And it is a fairly tight knit group and there's only a few companies that dominate the country.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/world/asia/critics-see-so...
[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/south-korea/freedom-net/202...
Even in modern times, I think most don't realize how wacky Korean politics has been. For instance the president from 2013-2017 (Park Geun-hye, daughter of a former dictator) was involved in some sort of weird cult-like grooming controversy where she was being groomed and controlled by what some media called a 'Korean Rasputin.' She was eventually impeached and imprisoned for corruption/abuse of power, and is now serving decades in prison.
And it seems the current president of South Korea has an approval rating in the 30s. So I have no idea how Koreans view their government, but it's really unlike anything I think that we can compare elsewhere. But I suspect "trust" and "integrity" are not the sort of words that'd be on top.
Although what I suspect will happen is that North Korea will fall apart eventually and South Korea will get a demographic surge from immigrating North Koreans.
I wish. It's a national tradition to jail and then pardon the president. She's been free for years, and is often kow-towing and gladhanding current administration members.
Because cyber defamation would go rampant otherwise and people would end up killing themselves on lost reputation and cyber bullying. You have to understand Korean culture, where reputation and how you're viewed in society is extremely important.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/24/hana-kimura-gr...
I do understand it, and I think it is dumb. If it is to the point that it is causing people to kill themselves, it is dumb. This doesn't justify the people harassing others, but rather that the cultural element about getting so involved that leads to such harassment is also dumb. Cultures are hard to change, but at the end of the day it literally is up to people collectively deciding change is needed. There is nothing physical in the way. Habits are hard to change, but not impossible. And we should not excuse harmful behavior by claiming it is simply culture.
(There are many elements of Korean culture that are great. But they do not necessarily rely on such a strong notion of reputation. Reputation can still be important without going to this extreme, where it is excessively difficult to redeem.)
> Distribution of porn is illegal there and they do their best to block it from outside.
Incorrect, it's yet another incorrect meme. Legal pornography is always possible in South Korea, and while the actual threshold varied over time (because you know, there is no objective metric for them anyway so it has to be a function of the approximate social consensus), legal pornography is not necessarily "milder" than illegal pornography distributed via blocked websites. (EDIT: incorrectly put "stronger" there...)
The South Korean treatment of pornography was extremely distorted mainly because of the rampant copyright violation over pornographic materials produced elsewhere. That blocked virtually all attempts to sell legal pornography and profit from it, why would you pay when you already have tons of free porns out there. Technically speaking, a large portion of the current adult population should have been found guilty if foreign producers could sue them, and I can tell you that the name of a certain blocked but still popular pornographic website [1] has became a household name for many males in their 20s and 30s!
And here is where the SK law's technical distinction between legal pornography and illegal obsence material turned out to be handy. Since those websites distributed pornography illegally, you can just consider them obscene and thus exempted from the copyright protection (!). I really hate this situation and like to see the radical change, but I can also see that it would become a massive and uncontrollable international affair otherwise. So that's why those websites had to be banned (to signal that it is indeed illegal), but the ban itself is so weak that it can be easily bypassed (more effective ban would be harder to justify).
[1] I don't like to quote its exact name, but as a hint, it is often followed by "꺼라 turn sth off".
You acknowledge that legal pornography, while technically possible, faces significant hurdles due to rampant piracy and legal loopholes. This creates a situation where accessing legal pornography is difficult and impractical for most, making the initial statement, that distribution is effectively illegal, more accurate than your initial "Incorrect" suggests.
I never said pornography is illegal.
Are they really more trusting of the government in south korea or is that just what people will say if you ask them?
If my government aggressively went after every youtuber and literal child who dared to say bad things about the government I'd probably lie and say I trusted my government too whenever asked.
Good. Why should any country be a conduit for porn? Most sane countries frown upon and limit things like porn, gambling, drugs, etc. Like we used to until fairly recently.
> They are pretty big on cyber defamation and will go after people who make fun of government officials[0]
It's like that in most countries. Other countries can have their own values. Nothing wrong with it.
> They have a comparatively low internet freedom score because they do things like fine middle schoolers for having anti-government websites and the president pursues legal action against YouTubers[1].
Freedomhouse is apparently a state propaganda outfit.
'Most of the organization's funding comes from the U.S. State Department[4] and other government grants.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House
You are linking to a propaganda site created solely to push a political agenda. Germany has an amazing 'freedom' scores but you could go to jail in germany for espousing certain beliefs about certain events in ww2.
That south korea scores low in the freedomhouse index is a good thing. Though it is surprising given that south korea is a militarily occupied vassal of the US.
> It's pretty interesting when coming from the west where all the problems are often spoken about in the open.
Are they really? You are conflating 'the west' with the US. Most of 'the west' is not like america. In most of the west, you can go to jail or be punished for speech. Most of the west doesn't have free speech that we do in america.
What's with the neverending 'coming from the west' from foreigners here? So many foreigners here pretend to be americans here? Why?
I'm going to assume you don't travel much cause on our side of the pound we can very much speak out loud of many things the US can't.
In fact, we don't have the absurd taboos that force the US to use alternative words. We can:
- Report "He disrespected his colleague, calling him a niger". No need to hide that behind "the n-word".
- We can call pedophilia what it is and debate about how to punish it, instead of using acronyms like CSAM for fear of being labeled in a certain way.
- We can show tits or talk about vagina and not get "porn" tagged all over.
Pound? What country are you from? Why are people so sneaky? Hiding behind 'the west'.
> In fact, we don't have the absurd taboos that force the US to use alternative words.
What? None of what you wrote applies to the US and none of it has anything to do with free speech. It applies to woke social media. What does 'porn tag' have to do with free speech? Besides, my point was being jailed or punished by the government.
> We can:
Question the holocaust without going to jail?
Yes. It's because the internet of Korea is so well done between nearly all areas of the country with great speeds.
But it's true that Korean internet is super fast only within Korea, but the borders are also normal fast borders to other countries so they're just as fast as say a 1gbps connection in Australia.
Good Korean internet is not a myth, they had fibre everywhere by the time rich people in the US or Europe were getting it. Korean internet is good, it's just that their ISPs are also fairly evil like the rest of the world, but they have less freedom constraining their evils.
As said, it was good/impressive 20 years ago, now it's just what everyone else has. And SK software is a joke, like the linked post elaborates.
I don't know if it changed during the last 5 years, but when I was there I wanted to use Google maps for navigation and it looked like shit, so after some digging around I found because apparently there are some SK patents that prevent Google from using a lot of modern tech. So no wonder SK people compare that to naver and think their IT tech is top notch, but if you compare it to the "real Google", it's a joke.
It's the same in China actually, but there you simply can't access the western counterparts at all usually.
Google is free to do what it wants in Australia, but it still sucks pretty bad.
But yeah, SK software got sabotaged by people in power unfortunately. But the software also has some high standards from locals it has to live up to.
So it's stuck in a situation where the app is quite neat, but it will be as stubborn as a mule if it needs anything to spec.
Funny how both spectrums of fully controlled market and fully free market can be terrible. Apparently what they did was a crime but it shows the spirit, they though at least that they can do it and get away with it.
Same here in Japan. The funny thing is that both me here and my parents back in Spain have gigabit fibre, yet my parents' connection is much faster than mine.
More details: https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/internet-fragmenta...
I'm actually very impressed. If this happened in the US, the police wouldn't care about it at all, and would just tell everyone affected that "it's a civil matter" and they'll have to file a lawsuit if they don't like it.
But against a large company? I'll believe it when I see it.
The people who ordered it done will be fine.
Perhaps this would be a good moment to pause and ask yourself why this hasn’t happened in the US.
It took 3 years but the FBI published the names of the fellows they believe are responsible for breaching equifax and stealing private data about half of americans
Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei
Note that KT, while relatively recently privatized, is still a national corporation that is considered a critical national asset under the law (thus if the North attacks, KT towers are first priority to be protected by the South's military). So, it is not as if some rogue SME infected its users with malware; it's a national corporation infecting its users over and not even be sorry about it (as in the article).
Plenty of other comments detail the strange Active X requirement: The national law had dependency on Internet Explorer/Active X. (I do not know of any developed nation having a national legal dependency on a specific corporation's consumer technology at this scale.) Also, many comments on South Korea's purportedly great infrastructure (albeit two decades ago). There is more to this.
Interestingly, if you ask an average Korean, he would say Korea is literally the best nation in IT/internet technology, topping or at least on par with the US. The national propaganda effort that went into forming this collective conscious should not be understated. Even many of the top programmers in South Korea I met strongly believe in this superiority. I wonder if this strong sense of superiority is both (1) preventing SK from improving its actually-lagging tech and (2) act in Dostoevskian-Raskolnikov manners thinking that it is above the law and consensus ("the best can break the rules and set new ones"). Whatever the underlying reason may be, there is a serious techno-cultural issue going on in the country.
One of the biggest banks in South Korea blacklisted Amazon as a financial scammer because it's Prime subscription renews monthly and customers complained after seeing the renewal charge on their credit cards. The ban was national -- no customer of this bank could buy a product from Amazon unless he calls the bank personally and ask the charge to be approved. Again, the issue wasn't technical. It was cultural.
Odd statement. How did you know that the people you met are "top programmers?"
To be fair I can see why the practices of Amazon could be considered a scam. Every time you buy something you have to untick "I want Prime"
Edit: While looking for an answer, I ran across this article. Apparently they've been fighting for a while (2015):
As an ISP if they detect you doing it, and they control DNS servers, maybe they mark your account for death, and they could like randomly hijack you going to google.com to some download for malware, and unsuspecting user clicks accept? Not sure, i'm curious how they pulled this off.
And if the one that breaks ranks is tiny, that might still not be enough reason for the others. Since there is a good chance they will just fail.
Competition theory assumes that if firms are abusing their market position by overcharging consumers, competitors can enter the market and undercut them.
When you have a market with very high barriers to entry (government regulation + physical infrastructure costs), you can't just start your own internet service provider to undercut existing Korean telecommunications, because you won't make enough money to pay your investment back.
Unfortunately some people genuinely believe the private sector will always deliver services cheaper and more efficiently than the public sector, so all around the world this mistake keeps being made. And the continual failures seem to never affect the firm belief of the adherents to that theory…
It's similar to arresting someone because they are speaking French. I don't speak French and I don't like people who speak French because sometimes French people say stuff I don't agree with. I don't know what they're saying but I hate it.
ISPs also provide TV and a bunch of other services, though, and some of them might require installing specific software in order to use on a PC. Or perhaps they hijacked an unencrypted download of someone else's software, most likely some component of the file sharing service in dispute.
From what I understand of the autotranslation, the ISP planted the malware somehow and that malware interfered with the P2P system, but no mention of actually using the P2P protocol to spread the malware
https://news.jtbc.co.kr/article/article.aspx?news_id=NB12201...
Project is now being nationalised as kt: - didn't pay subcontractors. Many of them went bankrupt - offered prices so large, that other isps would rather create their own infra than use theirs - abandon the project totally Of course i shouldn't put this under KT's name, as they used a subcompany - SungGwang - for all the dirty stuff.
So, fast forward: we laid a new infra parallel to this one in many cases and that one lays in the ground and rots.
For context, the legal situation of network usage in South Korea is something akin to Ajit Pai's wet dream. Network operators are legally empowered to charge troll tolls on both ends of any connection they want. Infrastructure costs are to be borne by literally anyone BUT the network operators.
To compound this, South Korea is economically an authoritarian hellscape. Large megacorporations[0] own everything and the government is just a clearinghouse and mediator for their interests. Corruption is so rampant that even administrations run by ardent anti-corruption activists wind up being toppled by rampant and widespread corruption.
I guarantee you that not one SK Telecom executive will spend time behind bars for this blatantly illegal conduct. Anyone with the power to put people behind bars in South Korea will be unmade if they touch a chaebol.
[0] These are specifically called chaebols and the group includes LG, Hyundai, Samsung, Lotte, and a few others. Japan used to have something similar, but they ate their rich... and then brutally invaded and colonized half of East Asia.
More like the Allied occupation forced them to dissolve the zaibatsu. They later reformed as the keiretsu, and while still immensely powerful, are nowhere the level of the old zaibatsu or the Korean chaebol.
I mean, you're assuming that an SK Telecom executive did something illegal. I don't think anyone here is a supporter of corruption, but you're making a huge, completely unjustified leap to say that an SK executive was involved.
They are scanning SNI field and manipulate packet to prevent user visit certain sites.
This is a popular meme that is also not entirely correct. I should stress that this incident is very different from the usual MITM from ISP and government though. I assumed you are talking about the general MITM because you mentioned SNI (because you can't put malwares with just SNI sniffing).
The constitution only says about the "privacy of correspondence" in the Article 18, and several acts including the Protection of Communications Secrets Act (통신비밀보호법) [1] and the Act on Promotion of Information and Communication Network Utilization and Information Protection (정보통신망 이용촉진 및 정보보호 등에 관한 법률) [2] do have many exceptions that make them legal at least in principle. Indeed, most websites blocked by SK ISPs host either illegal obscene materials (distinct from the legal pornography in the SK legal system) or advocacy for North Korea (illegal due to the National Security Act 국가보안법). I'm not necessarily for such blocks but it is plain wrong to say that they are illegal.
[1] https://elaw.klri.re.kr/eng_service/lawView.do?hseq=7235&lan...
[2] https://elaw.klri.re.kr/eng_service/lawView.do?hseq=38422&la...
Also the watchmen argument against such restrictions is so old at this point that there are lots of counterpoints available for you, if you wish.
Oh yeah, see the Act on Promotion of Information and blablabla, Articles 42-2, 44-2, 44-3 and 44-7. In particular Article 44-7 (2) through (4) explicitly allow for such technical measure to be enforced. ("Information and communications services" include ISPs for sure, see the definitions in Article 2.) Like it or not, it is legal in principle and your claim doesn't make it illegal.
> not everyone and not every network requests are related to national security and illegal action(i.e. gamble, drugs, etc.)
By the way, you seem to acknowledge that the government can scan them for illegal actions then?
nice try.
Huh? The users are paying for their network, so they should be free to do with it as they wish. How is Webhard involved in this discussion? This is something the ISP may wish to discuss with its users, if the ISP feels the users are consuming more than they paid for.
Good luck to the believers that someone there will be punished for this. For everyone else, switch to encrypted protocols.