Trojan-infested? I'm Sorry, Your Time is Up

An Australian ISP is pulling the plug on users whose computers have been compromised until they clean up their machines. Telstra Bigpond has begun disconnecting users whose computers had been infected. "Customers with suspected compromised PCs are being contacted where possible to encourage them to rectify the issue and if necessary are being disconnected from the network while the issue is rectified," the ISP said.

Bigpond is Australia's largest ISP, but said that its network was being so overwhelmed with bogus DNS requested that some customers were reporting slowdowns in legitmate uses. The ISP said it had also boosted the capacity of its DNS server.

"Ongoing investigations have identified Trojan-infected customer PCs as the likely source of the false DNS requests," BigPond said. "Customers contacted in recent weeks in relation to their PCs issuing large numbers of false DNS requests have been found to have PCs infected with various viruses and trojans and lacking network security."

View: Telstra Bigpond