| I can't speak to German ISPs or anyone outside of these USA. But I believe that ISPs are absolutely the weakest link when it comes to malicious botnets and other types of widespread network-based compromises. ISPs certainly have the tooling and the positioning to be able to detect C&C channels, outgoing DDOS attacks, and compromised customer premises equipment. But do they? And if they do detect any of it, do they take action? When is the last time you heard about an ISP disconnecting a paying customer because of the customer's compromised device(s)? When is the last time you even heard of an ISP notifying a customer about such a thing? Two months ago, my router was compromised and joined to some sort of botnet in the capacity of a DNS resolver. I would never have been able to detect such WAN-side traffic if I hadn't had a special setup on my part. My ISP was the first to hear when I'd detected it, and I sincerely doubt that they receive many such reports, especially with logs as evidence. Can you imagine receiving a phone call, "Hello, this is your ISP! You're pwned! Please follow through these remediation steps as I prompt you: ..." You'd undoubtedly think it was a phishing scam. Because ISPs just don't seem to care about abuse. They will send you copyright strikes and prosecute you for BitTorrent, but it does't seem like they'd lift a finger to prevent the next big DDOS or spam factory originating from their own customers. |
But it's possible they were just passing on abuse reports from the numerous targeted victims of this botnet who bothered to complain.
The intrusion point was a Linux system with a 3 letter password and ssh exposed on a nonstandard port. So if you're someone who still thinks the bad guys won't find your computer because you changed the port, know that that is very outdated thinking.