Mirai is plenty bad and getting worse

*A useful summary there.

https://slim-weight.info/2016/12/botnet-broke-internet-isnt-going-away/%3C/p%3E%3Cp class="paywall">by Lily Hay Newman

The Botnet That Broke the Internet Isn’t Going Away

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Mirai is a type of malware that automatically finds Internet of Things devices to infect and conscripts them into a botnet—a group of computing devices that can be centrally controlled. From there this IoT army can be used to mount distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in which a firehose of junk traffic floods a target’s servers with malicious traffic. In just the past few weeks, Mirai disrupted internet service for more than 900,000 Deutsche Telekom customers in Germany, and infected almost 2,400 TalkTalk routers in the UK. This week, researchers published evidence that 80 models of Sony cameras are vulnerable to a Mirai takeover.

These attacks have been enabled both by the massive army of modems and webcams under Mirai’s control, and the fact that a hacker known as “Anna-senpai” elected to open-source its code in September. While there’s nothing particularly novel about Mirai’s software, it has proven itself to be remarkably flexible and adaptable. As a result, hackers can develop different strains of Mirai that can take over new vulnerable IoT devices and increase the population (and compute power) Mirai botnets can draw on….