Compromized modems in Thai IP Space

Tue Aug 11 13:08:28 UTC 2020

Hello folks,

Before you shoot me with 'wrong mailing list' replies, believe me, I
tried, THNOG is dead, APNIC ain't responding either and the ISP's over
there don't seem to care much. And I've been looking at this situation for
over 2 years now since first incident. I simply hope that with the
contacts you folks have due to your professions to be able to help.

So, I came across this botnet which decided to pick my IRC network as
control center, and I have been digging into them. It turns out that in
Thailand, people can easily get cloned modems in order to internet for
'free', it simply boils down to mac cloning, so let me spare you the
details. The problem is that these modems also carry a digital STD in the
form of additional botnet code, allowing the controllers to do, well,
botnet stuff.

I disabled their ability to control by glining everything on join to the
control channel, and since I am maintainer of DroneBL, add them to the
blacklist. Doing that for 2+ years now. The amount of removal requests
because people no longer are able to play on cncnet is amazing.

My question here kinda is, how to permanently get rid of this evil in an
effective way, and who to contact? (yes, I tried to get through to NOC's
of the affected providers), or could perhaps someone be so nice to use one
of their contacts in Thailand to speed things up?

Kind regards,

Alexander Maassen
Maintainer DroneBL