Catalin Cimpanu reports:
Two malware families battling for turf are most likely the cause of an outage suffered by Californian ISP Sierra Tel at the beginning of the month.
This outage took place on April 10, 2017, when Sierra Tel customers started complaining about losing Internet and telephone connectivity.
While initially there were unconfirmed rumors that the company had botched a firmware update, in a statement released the following day, on April 11, Sierra Tel admitted it was the victim of a “malicious hacking event.”
[…]
The incident was brought to Bleeping Computer’s attention by Janit0r, a man who claims to have developed BrickerBot, an IoT malware family that bricks unsecured IoT devices.
“BrickerBot was active on the Sierra Tel network at the time their customers reported issues,” Janit0r told Bleeping Computer in an email, “but their modems had also just been mass-infected with malware, so it’s possible some of the network problems were caused by this concomitant activity.”
Read more on Bleeping Computer.