Techies restore services to most of 13,000 dataline users

The State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) that escaped the ransomware attack about two months ago, got hit with ‘botnet’, a malware that left at least 13,000 of its customers ‘data-choked’ in the past few days.

‘Yes, it is true, but we cracked it and have restored most of the affected fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) and those using the broadband gateway through modems who complained of having their data communication systems taking a hit,” said Chief General Manager of TS and AP L. Anantha Ram.

Many complaints

Over the past 10 days data-service complaints were received — many of them from BSNL’s Hyderabad Telecom District (HTD) that has 75,000 on copper wire connections and 15,000 on FTTH. When the experts got down to the job, they found it was the mischief of a ‘botnet’. “Last time, we escaped the ransomware hit because customers had modems. But this time, the optical network terminals (ONT) could not escape the ‘botnet’,” he said.

What exactly is ‘botnet’ or a malware ? Just a simple code — one or a few more lines, that is introduced into a customer’s line. When he/she uses the internet, the multiplication happens till it is stopped and damage control taken up.

Services restored

“When the number of complaints started increasing, we put a special team and our experts found that this time, it was the handiwork of ‘botnet’. In a day, they found that by splitting voice, data services were unaffected. So we started doing that and restoring data services,” Mr. Ram explained.

HTD’s Principal General Manager K. Ramchand claimed that as soon as the customers began to register their complaints about disruption in their net services, the engineers were pressed into service and within 48 hours, they had ensured back data services were restored.

“We first split voice and data to get the service working and in a matter of day or two we would have resolved all complaints,” the Principal GM said.

Now, the mystery is how did the private telecom escape this ‘attack’? “We were hit by the ransomware earlier this year and this put us on our guard for any such attacks. Yes, the ‘botnet’ attack was true but our techies were up to it and we beat it,” executives of private telecom operators claimed.