Korean ISP Hacks Customers Using Torrent Software 

Having moved to Korea I can confirm that the internet is wack here. A lot of companies flat out require you to use VeraPort to even use their service. From banks to postal, they all require this same piece of junkware to be installed. Now what's fun about VeraPort? Each site can require VeraPort to load additional software. This installation is silent and without the user's permission. It can even adjust firewall rules and block local programs from running. Hell it even installs itself as a trusted root certificate. So my assumption is that KT used their DNS resolver to serve additional data to VeraPort and forced it to install this spyware. Since most koreans are forced to use this for "identity verification" anyway.

Something something no matter what you think they're doing, it's actually worse than that...

The Canadian and US governments wish they had this level of compliance from citizens.

As a Korean I did not know how bad the state of Korean internet is. I with KT goes out of business and the new Telcom company succeeds without greed.

외국인들도 이렇게 심각하게 관심을 가지는데 정작 한국에서는 별일 아니라는듯이 넘어가는게 말이 안된다. KT 사기랑 갑질사건이 1년에 몇개씩 터지는데 다른 통신사들이 전부다 KT회선 빌려쓰고 있으니 대안도 없음 ㅋㅋ

Let's talk about the Australian government trying to ban end to end encryption

Stay obedient and compliant. See how well it works for the koreans? Who doesn't want to live in a dystopia?

Both Koreas are kinda special countries.

Pirating in Portugal is so normal that you can't do anything about it. It's even in public schools as a tool for teachers

I always knew that online gaming in South Korea was a joke because the requirements of a real ID for the registration and payments. But looks like all the internet usage there is a mess

The North Korean side of South Korea

the craziest part about this is that they're getting in trouble

You should put the source of these articles that you get this information from.

Now, we all realize that our neighbor's garden is full of fake plants. XD

Japan also has ridiculous peering. I've seen so many tromboning routes coming out of APAC that it turns my hair grey

Figures that the KT logo vaguely resembles the Kotaku font 🤔

Hollywood lawyers? *rubs hands and grins*

Bit of an eye opener. I had no idea South Koreans did stuff like this, let alone stuff this fucked.

Absolutly wild

The fact that they can just pull that, means no one is safe in Korea.

north or south?

VPN

This highlights why people need to pay for their stuff directly. The incentives are all broken if they don't, and they will suffer for it in the end.

Charging companies for bandwidth would possibly make them reduce the amount of all the bloated js they use

This is the beginning of a very hard and strange era. Mark my words.

This is very serious one.

7:43 Who knows? Maybe their routers/ONUs have built-in payloads that they can just activate.

Imagine going to war with your customers

3:24 Nah, you got confused with Romania and Hungary, in villages, you can easily have 1Gb internet.

That sounds like an urban legend.

Most of Mental Outlaw videos are issues regarding in the U.S and other countries. Data breaches, corporate spyware, forced subscription services, hidden backdoors, etc. Man releases ONE video that's in Korea and people are calling that place a cyberpunk dystopia. Talk about a confirmation bias..

Just wait when Karma comes for the Korean ISP . There entire company data gets blackmailed for crypto currency payments

Can't relate. My ISP doesn't give a tenth of a fuck about what I do online, even if I don't pay. Third world Chads rise up.

This shit right here is why I laugh when people thinks SK is a paradise of freedom and the atomic fatty is the (only) bad guy here

Possibly something done from the CPE also.

Reading comments I suddenly see why Qubes would make sense...

North or South; Korea will Korea

I used a KT Wifi Egg when I visited Korea last summer, am I cooked?

people dont seem to understand Korea is practically a cyberpunk dystopia lol

*I will pirate everything, keep it forever, and there isn't a sneed thing anyone can do about it.*

This sounds like the nightmare scenario of what the Internet could've become.

It's not North Korea doing the hacking for once

This is why you absolutely say no to anyone that wants you to install their app/code on you PC or phone. You just don't know what kind of STD you'll be picking up.

In my country they don't care. A ISP employee said all the DMCA emails they get just sit there in the inbox unread lol.

I don't know about this incident, but the thing is, since the start of the commercial Internet, Koreans have been trained to install any random binary to use web services, so they probably just installed some random binary that the KT website told them to install. All Korean websites that deal with money or government information require the user to install ActiveX (these days, Windows binary for Chrome extensions, but they are practically the same thing). This is even mandated by the law, so even if some companies didn't want to use such things, they have to "to protect the customers". Bank websites will install an antivirus and anti keylogger. You already have your own antivirus? Doesn't matter; you have to install the bank's one anyway. Well, I use a Windows VM just to use Korean websites, and the VM is riddled with crappy background processes even from the start when the web browser has not started. The background processes of these quote unquote security services take 30~40% of the CPU when there is no foreground app.

That is horrible. In Chile we have a net neutrality law. I pay $11 dollars per month for fixed 500mbps, totally uncapped and I can torrent whatever I want except really illegal stuff (P-level stuff of course). Have HDDs full of BR rips and emulation. ISPs can't do anything and they must ensure our contracted speeds, even through P2P!

KT shows hostility towards their customers everyday. LG Uplus is very glad to use Huawei equipment. SK Broadband simply sucks bad and kills your would-be-best esports match of the day. Other local providers? Hell, no. All traffic outbound from Korea will pass KT's backbone. Welcome to Cyberpunk 2024.

"With McaFee VPN I-" Dodges shoe

It's so fun seeing more people realise how doomed that country is in general

Hmmm, not all torrents are illegal, i remember getting various distros of linux that way

South Korea its a die hard dystopia, not only it's internet, the entire country is like that.

I never thought I'd have to give kudos to Comcast, but hey they didn't infect me with malware

people finding out that both sides of parallel 38 are a dystopia:

I own my games I own my music I own my movies and I get to share them however the fuck I want with whoever I damn please

I used to think South Korea was a cool place. My opinion has been changing rapidly over the past few months.

Number 1. KT Corp is the single largest ISP in Korea, not middle nor minor in any means (think AT&T). And a company this big hacking its own users (basically good portion of Korean citizens) is beyond belief. Number 2. Probably KT will be okay. Korea government is in favor of telecom companies and never did anything in the past to punish them when they did horrendous things to Koreans. And more thing, EVEN KOREANS don't care about this KT incident that much. Why? They are so get used to this kind of *uckery by telecom companies (not only KT, but all of them) and it's just another day to Korean. Can you believe this?

Cover Indonesia's massive data breach

ah yes, the best way of getting repeat customers

The peninsula is a massive hell on earth

I remember all my bros torrenting PSP ISOs n albums back in the day over the high school wifi The ISP letters where real LMAO

one of the worst thing to worry about on the internet is when your isp themselves spread malware/virus/ransomware.

Not my android showing KT when it boots up 😂

Maybe the real malware are the friends we made.

From what I understand twitch had to shut down in South Korea because I couldn’t pay the amount the ISP needed to keep traffic up.

the ISP likely has access to the certificate authority, so they prolly used MITM

Seeing as they're an ISP, I wonder if they used DNS spoofing on their own servers to MITM the traffic. It would explain why the damage was limited to subscribers, since nobody's really gonna use the DNS server of an ISP they don't have. Just goes to show how important trust is in the structure of the Internet. I hope they lose their business. What an absolute clown move.

This form of, i dont even know what you would call it, punishment? Doesnt make any sense, how do they really benefit by giving their customers devices malware?

We always forget that we dont own the modems that out ISP give us. Its the easiest point of ingress for the SKorean ISP to inject said malware

South Korea worst Korea.

I'm starting to think it's better to just leave them to the north. At least they'd have a higher birth rate.

BRO I was just in Seoul, South Korea and had a KT hotspot device for my laptop and phone. I'm throwing up right now.

Holy christ guys. I am here in Seoul using Kt at my place. I dont use that cloud bs and I torrent a lot. Most I've ever seen is some throttling and a text from the police asking me if I torrent. Same as other countries I said I dont speak Korean and blocked their texts. Nothing came of it. No mallard nothing.

Thanks. Watching this rn over KT lol btw, webhard services are similar to file sharing hosts like mediafire, not torrenting.

> more developed than the north > looks inside > similarly dystopian

Disgusting. As a Black American living in the midwest, I'll never do business with korean telecom.

if this happenned in the US, there would be a massive lawstuit, and the people would win.

No way, the Chaebol Cyberpunk Dystopia does shit like this? But we heard so many cool things from that despicable state

In Korea, cloud stores YOU

Here in Brazil my ISP used to cache the mostly downloaded torrents, bandwidth problem solved lol

north korea is safer 😂😂😂😂

Completely crazy situation. Will will not own your files, your computer, or your identity as long as the ISP acts like a government-endorsed internet gestapo.

So there is apparently more context to this situation according to what I heard from koreans I know, KT themselves actually operate a 'webhard' services themselves. Knowing this, apparently people who got hit by malicious software wasn't all general bittorrent users, but specifically focused on certain webhard service that uses bittorrent protocol for efficiency on their end. This kinda explains how they were so easily able to inject malware that causes disruption of service without everyone immediately noticing - they are targeting very specific software, not hitting everything that uses similar protocol. As for that specific webhard service. It is apparently owned by LG U+. If you are wondering, they are another ISP that is competition to KT. It even caught people who are used to ISP shenanigans in Korea surprised. I guess at least they are slightly braver? (or more insane) than Canadian ISP for willing to give direct middle finger to not just weak individual customer, but to massive company who has record of spiting back. Whether customer will move to either SKT or LG U+ from KT is to be seen. KT was always in free fall ever since it became a private company.

Pls stop using Tor with a VPN, and always use E2EE indefinitely.

Kim Jong Un save us 🙏Kim Jong Un save us 🙏Kim Jong Un save us 🙏Kim Jong Un save us 🙏Kim Jong Un save us 🙏Kim Jong Un save us 🙏

I print out every letter from my ISP and frame it

8:10 - "I really have no idea how this thing that I explained how it happened 3 minutes ago happened!" COMMENT BELOW to explain it to me if you've watched my video explaining it!

WHAT? isps send you a LETTER when you torrent in the usa?? i always use torrent without a vpn in my country cuz they just don't care lol

one more fear unlocked, no peace of mind.

2:53 - that looks like Windows XP

Time to buy a NAS and run zerotier for home VPN and host a private DNS

Truely the ONLy way to be freebis to own your own ISP, not track, possibky even anonymous payment.

South Korea is as democratic as North Korea, but they do a better job at marketing.

Japan proving once again that they are the superior asians

completely unrelated but did you know UAE only has 2 telecoms, one is so dominant that their most of their data speeds are still measured in KB/s despite having the infrastructure to offer better and are still the most common choice. the government had a 80% share (allegedly less now) and they banned VOIPs like discord, skype and WhatsApp so people have to use the expensive totally not tapped international calls instead. my telecom doesn't seem so bad now tbh.

To be fair, Korean internet is probably the least regulated out there so it wouldn't be a surprise if some media magnate bribed KT to break and infect their clients.

I don't really see the point. Wouldn't deleting people's files make them redownload and use even more bandwidth? oh right, they have to pay for that...

0:15 the most annoying part of these are that some indie devs that have alpha builds and early access games that are way too large for free file sharing sites like MEGA get hurt by this too. i follow some game creators that have servers up and share their early access games via torrents or some mod maker that make large texture mods also have servers up to share their mods with torrents bc other wise it would take days to download the games or mods through browser downloads. heck even most Linux distros have torrent option for their ISOs and flagging all torrents as pirated content is just lazy af

I thought south koreans are the good guys...not the north, i am disappointed.

Yep, looks like it's that ole 'THIS PERSON SHOULDN'T APPEAR IN THE COMMENTS ANYMORE!' time of the election year.

The thing is, South Korea started using sensitive stuff on the internet before https became commonplace, so they use a bunch of additional software for “security”, that are totally outdated. On my work computer with Windows 11, I have at least 15 different “보안프로그램“ installed. If Kt managed to man in the middle one of those at an update, they could get basically all of their customers.