If you're a Time Warner Cable subscriber who has been having trouble with your Internet service lately, the company wants you to know why. In a letter to Ars, Jeff Simmermon, the director for Digital Communications at TWC, told us, "We've been having serious service problems in SoCal related to hacker activity." The company has posted an official statement on the issue with a few more details, but the culprits' identities are as yet unknown (or being kept out of the public while the situation is under investigation.)

In its official statement, Time Warner Cable states that the attacks have been occurring over the past seven days and that they have caused customer DNS queries to repeatedly time out. The company's statements refer to these outages as "sporadic timeouts which appeared to be random events," implying that it took corporate IT time to ascertain the malicious intent behind these seemingly random failures.

These sort of attacks are scarcely news to any major ISP, but Time Warner admits that the problem this time around has been both larger and more difficult to control. As of February 24, the ISP claims to have deployed additional early detection and response capabilities, but declined to offer additional details on how the new systems function or if they closed any newly discovered loophole that allowed this attack on the ISP to occur. Boilerplate advice follows: customers who want to reduce their chance of being infected by malware or zombified by a botnet should update their antivirus scanner and/or deploy some sort of firewall. The standard "we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you" concludes the statement.

Kudos to TWC for stepping up and admitting the existence and scope of the problem—better to tell your customers there is an issue rather than let them sit around pulling out their hair. If the ISP really wants to make a good impression it could pro-rate the monthly bill for those customers who were effectively knocked offline for significant amounts of time, but TWC's apology may not extend into actual service compensation.

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