The incident affected modems and routers belonging to Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL), two Indian state-owned telecommunications service providers.
From Tuesday, July 25 and up to Saturday, July 29, users reported losing Internet connectivity as routers and modems became stuck with their red LED remaining always on.
BSNL told local press that malware caused the downtime. Besides customers routers, the malware also affected routers part of BSNL’s National Internet Backbone (NIB), but these were immediately recovered.
An employee of BSNL’s technical team told Deccan Chronicle that the incident caused modems in northeast, north and south Indian states to lose connectivity. According to The Hindu, the downtime was prolonged until Saturday because BSNL employees were also on strike.Over the weekend, the author of the BrickerBot malware approached Bleeping Computer and claimed he was behind the downtime.
BrickerBot is a malware strain that affects Linux-based IoT and networking devices. Unlike other malware that hoards devices into botnets for DDoS attacks and other purposes, BrickerBot “bricks” the equipment by rewriting its flash storage. In most cases this bricking effect can be reversed, but in some cases this is permanent.
