For the last two years I have had a service running that floods garbage data back to the collection point from several addresses throughout the Internet.
I know we can't expect the "average" consumer to do this, but thanks for caring and running tcpdump on your network! It amazes me that with a lot of these stories there's no one popping up with a pcap showing exactly what's going on.
I'm hoping projects like Turris Omnia [1] will allow people to be more in control of what goes in and out of the LAN - my network, my rules.
You don't really need a open source router. Just something that can be flashed with Openwrt or dd-wrt. The router you linked actually runs a fork of Openwrt.
Yeah, they're pretty rare in Australia due to our reliance on ADSL - unless you flash with DD-WRT. It's still not something everyone does. OpenWRT and DD-WRT's UIs are pretty rough (although, most commercial UIs are, too)
I'm running OpenWRT on a TP-Link TL-WR841N/ND v8 and the LuCI interface that comes out of box is vastly better (cleaner and more feature-full) than the majority of consumer router interfaces I've encountered. In particular, the realtime graph of current connections!
You can likely set your ADSL modem into "bridge mode" and put a user-flashable device between that and your network. Once you get NBN you just connect the WAN port to the NBN termination box and you'll be getting DHCP from your ISP.
Is it an unsecured or secured connection? Can you make a connection?
You might want to check if they just blocked your IP addresses and your connections are being dropped. Although if you're been running it for 2 years(!), I think you have it covered.
Just a tip: It's very easy to clean up completely garbage data from a database. Any data scientist worth their salt would do that. Getting rid of your garbage data just needs a couple lines of code. What you need to do is, skew the data so that it isn't suspicious but eventually will mess up their inferences.
It would be nice to rope in some chan-ners and a bot net or two. I think the data should say that the entire country watched a certain Rick Astley video on repeat for the next year.
Glad to know someone is giving them hell. I purchased a Vizio TV on black friday and suspected that all manufacturers would be doing something like this. For that reason I never configured it to access my wireless network. Scary to realize that it was actually happening and at this scale.
For the last two years I have had a service running that floods garbage data back to the collection point from several addresses throughout the Internet.
You're welcome.