Article published on the Linux Horizon website
October 21, 2016 - A day to remember. The IoT gets to life but not in the good way.
Friday, October 21 was the day when the IoT decepticons army had the first stroke.
Unfortunately is not a movie but this even have lot things in common with the Transformers movie.
In few words, the IoT botnet lunched the biggest large distributed
denial-of-service attacks targeting the Krebs on Security website take
it down for a while.
Well, in the IT security filed the things are moving fast, but this time was unexpected a such large attack using a
botnet designed primary to penetrate and take control over BusyBox systems.
According to Javvad Malik, one of the AlienVault cyber-security specialists, and I quote,
"The Mirai botnet is malware designed to take control of the BusyBox systems that are commonly used in IoT devices.
BusyBox software is a lightweight executable capable of running several Unix tools in a variety of POSIX environments that have
limited resources, making it an ideal candidate for IoT devices. It appears the DDoS attacks of October 21
have been identified as sourced from XiongMai Technologies IoT equipment.".
The peak power was reached on September 20, 2016 when the Mirai botnet
delivered 620 Gbps DDoS traffic to Krebs on Security website.
That's was a record! 620 Gbps generated by IoT devices??? Wow!
Do you think that was enough? Well, is more than that.
The person who appear to be responsible for the attack, Anna-senpai published the source-code of the Mirai botnet client,
loader and CNC console: http://hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=5420472
For those who don't have hackforum account, the source was posted also on Github: https://github.com/jgamblin/Mirai-Source-Code/
Hmmm... Source-code of a malware tool, do we want to release the demons
in the dark? Well, yes! Even so, publishing the source-code it's a good
thing after all. :)
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