Week 3
New
Mirai Variant of Infamous
IoT Botnet Unleashes
54-Hour DDoS Attack
A variant of the Mirai botnet was discovered as the culprit
for a 54 hour Disrupted Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against a U.S. college.
Last October the Mirai botnet was one of the most talked about DoS attack in
history. The Mirai botnet is a type of malware that automatically finds vulnerable
Internet of Things (IoT) devices and makes them into a group of computing
devices that can be centrally controlled. Once enough groups of the IoT’s have
been assembled they can be used to launch a DDoS attack releasing large amounts
of traffic on a targets servers.
Since the Mirai botnet source code was leaked several new
variants have surfaced. One version attacked 2400 TalTalk Telcom home routers
in the UK, a new windows variant has been found that would spread the Linux
Trojan to other IoT devices. More than 900,000 Deutsche Telekom customers in
Germany internet service was disrupted. Researchers have recently found that 80
models of Sony cameras are vulnerable to a Mirai takeover.
According to Security Week magazine “On Feb. 28, the new
Mirai threat was used to launch a DDoS attack against a US college, and
researchers say that the assault continued for 54 hours straight. The average
traffic was of over 30,000 requests per second (RPS) and peaked at around
37,000 RPS, the highest of any Mirai botnet (the attack generated a total of
over 2.8 billion requests).” (Arghire, 2017)
References
Arghire,
I. (2017, March 29). New Mirai Variant Unleashes 54-Hour DDoS Attack.
Retrieved from Security Week:
http://www.securityweek.com/new-mirai-variant-unleashes-54-hour-ddos-attack
Newman,
L. (2016, December 09). The Botnet That Broke the Internet Isn’t Going Away.
Retrieved from Wired:
https://www.wired.com/2016/12/botnet-broke-internet-isnt-going-away/
