Click Bait
And the celebrity nudes angle? It's unverified. And likely a way to get you clicking on stories.
But El Reg caught me with it again. Curse 'em!
New Zealand's largest ISP, Spark, has spent the weekend fighting off a DDOS incorrectly assumed to have a connection with last week's nude celebrity picture scandal. The ISP hit trouble last Friday, when it Tweeted that some of its subscribers had become infected with malware that was flooding its DNS servers and making it …
For this to be a significant issue, there must have been a large installed base of similarly vulnerable routers. Could the ISP itself be to blame for providing these to its customers, or are these commonly used modems bought by customers themselves?
Sydney Morning Herald says a few were provided by Spark but even those were "reconfigured" by the users.
The NZ consumer market suffered for many years from a bit of a monopoly ("absence of competition"?) on low-cost device types being sold which would also connect to the certain major ISP without something approximating sysadmin skills. ISP provided ones were from the same range of vendors.
Those of us clueful enough to buy quality rather than cheap hardware tend to prefer other ISP services as well. So most of the populace served by said ISP has a range of crap hardware even today.
And give them even more data to sink their claws into? Hell no!
This is why I set up my own DNS server that pulls root.zone from http://www.internic.net/zones/ and just connects to the zone masters directly, doesn't even need to bother the root servers. It cuts out the need for quite a few steps and tends to give much faster responses, no more ISP page redirects, no tracking, and best of all, I can completely ignore the new gTLDs.