If you do a bit more digging the ISP is not Lumen ... It is a well known ISP and I recall reading about this outage when it happened. I don’t know if indeed this was a botched attempt to gather a bot network or like some said an intentional act to get attention. Robert Jacobs | Data Center Manager Direct: 832-615-7742 Main: 832-615-8000 Fax: 713-510-1650 5959 Corporate Dr. Suite 3300; Houston, TX 77036 A Certified Woman-Owned Business 24x7x365 Customer Support: 832-615-8000 | support@pslightwave.com This electronic message contains information from PS Lightwave which may be privileged and confidential. The information is intended to be for the use of individual(s) or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this information is prohibited. If you have received this electronic message in error, please notify me by telephone or e-mail immediately. -----Original Message----- From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+rjacobs=pslightwave.com@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Christopher Morrow Sent: Monday, June 3, 2024 1:04 PM To: Matt Erculiani <merculiani@gmail.com> Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: 600,000 routers bricked CAUTION: External Email. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. On Mon, Jun 3, 2024 at 1:40 PM Matt Erculiani <merculiani@gmail.com> wrote:
It's important to note though that if you quietly (or even publicly) patch 600k devices to fix a bug, nobody cares. Plus, doing so is still a crime: it's 600k instances of accessing a computer system without permission. It's also far, FAR easier to write a stream of 0s to the bootloader than it is to decompile and debug bad firmware.
Lumen USED TO HAVE a walled-garden they dropped people into when their links/network ran amok.. at least in legacy-qwest/century-link consumer connectivity situations. maybe that's gone now? maybe the part of the affected network for this incident didn't have that capability?