Hyderabad: A botnet attack has affected the information built into modems used for BSNL’s broadband services across the country. BSNL broadband services have been affected for three days.
“Preliminary investigation by the BSNL technical team identified the problem from central servers and internal modems at the National Internet Backbone. As there was delay in identifying botnet, modems at customer’s end were affected. 90 per cent of newly installed modems got affected by the malware,” Broadband Services deputy general manager P. Murali said.
“We found that when the problem at NIB was rectified on Saturday morning, 10 per cent of modems in the city began functioning. As per the reports from CEO's office in New Delhi, hackers have targeted BSNL modems in the northeast, north and south Indian states,” a employee on the technical team said.
Principal general manager K. Ramachand said modems, which were not updated with new user ID and password, were affected. “By default, the modems have user ID as 'admin' and customers should change it,” he said.
The word ‘botnet’ is formed from two words ‘robot’ and ‘network’.
Cybercriminals use special Trojan viruses to breach the security of users computers, take control of each computer and organise all inf-ected machines into a network of ‘bots’ that they can remotely manage. In case of BSNL modems, it was found that hackers adopted denial of service method to destroy user details of all modems that were having user ID as ‘admin’.
