Now they’ve done it. Hackers are not content to just steal our personal information. They’ve now gone after our… internet! Last October, an as-yet-unidentified hacking group launched a cyberattack on a US telecommunications company, disabling the internet services for hundreds of thousands of customers.

The telecoms company (likely Arkansas-based Windstream) never alerted the public and the hack was only made public this spring by security experts at Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Lab who discovered the massive attack. Though a full accounting has not been assessed. The experts estimate some 600,000 internet routers throughout the Midwest were offline during the event which lasted at least two days. The majority of customers had their service restored within a few days, however, security experts say the malware the hackers introduced was still circulating around the internet months later (potentially doing further damage).

Of course, two days without the internet seems like an eternity (especially for the home shopper and the Netflix binger), but because this event mostly affected rural and underserved users, it’s also possible that emergency services were compromised, people lost access to telehealth, and even farmers may have lost critical data about their crops captured with remote monitoring.

Unfortunately, there is little that can be done to defend against this type of hack, and customers were just advised to swap their old routers for new. The best we can do in the face of these new and unpredictable hacks is to make sure to restart routers regularly (to allow for patches and updates) and maintain strong passwords. Try to be the squeaky wheel that hackers will just pass by.