Networking

More than 4.5 million DSL modems have been compromised as part of a sustained hacking campaign in Brazil, with the devices spreading malware and malicious web address redirects.

The attacks focused on a vulnerability in modem firmware that was largely ignored by users and the security community, security vendor Kaspersky said, allowing attackers to enter modem configuration settings and change the DNS server used to browse the internet.

Europe has tapped out its supply of Internet addresses in its assigned range, but some tech prospectors believe they've found some IPv4 gold—a full block of 16,777,216 addresses that isn't used to connect to the Internet. But the British government agency that owns the block of addresses (referred to in IP networking as a /8 block) has no intentions of giving it up, even though almost none of the addresses will ever be publicly accessible. That has inspired an electronic petition campaign on a House of Commons website to convince British lawmakers to auction off the address block.

Jeremy Hunt has pledged to give creative industries a shot in the arm by ensuring Britain has the fastest broadband network of any major European country by 2015.

The culture secretary's commitment marks a firming up of the government's original target to create the best superfast broadband network in Europe by the end of this parliament, and follows a House of Lords report into the national broadband strategy published last month.