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back to article Nude celeb pics wrongly blamed for DDOS at New Zealand's largest ISP

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 …

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  1. Ralph B

    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!

    5 0 Reply
  2. Caesarius
    Paris Hilton

    Nice for a change...

    ...to hear of a site managed well enough not to crash, not to leak details, etc., even though it was bound to suffer with that scale of attack. I suppose it's not normally news unless a site goes horribly wrong.

    And so back to lures of the flesh ;-)

    0 0 Reply
  3. foo_bar_baz

    Whose modems were they anyway

    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.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Amos
      Reply Icon

      Re: Whose modems were they anyway

      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.

      0 0 Reply
      1. I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects
        Reply Icon

        Re: Whose modems were they anyway

        Got a link to who the mass media corporations are the copapacketitioners?

        Alien Sugar and Rupert Mordork come to mind.

        0 0 Reply
  4. mark 63 Silver badge

    so was the ddos aimed at spark or elsewhere? and what did these "east europeans" have to gain from it?

    0 0 Reply
  5. Crazy Operations Guy

    "Point to Google's DNS servers"

    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.

    2 0 Reply

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