If you thought ‘Mirai’ was the culmination of the damage that a network of bots could cause to companies and organizations around the world, you may want to think about it again. As millions of connected devices could be used soon to end Internet. And no, it’s not an exaggeration or the plot of a new action movie.
This New Rapidly-Growing Botnet Threatens To Take Down The Internet
If you thought ‘Mirai’ was the culmination of the damage that a network of bots could cause to companies and organizations around the world, you may want to think about it again. Around a million companies have already been infected by a new botnet that has the potential to “eliminate the Internet” if its creators want.
This is confirmed by the researchers at CheckPoint, who see in this new cyber threat the same potential of ‘Mirai’ to launch computer attacks (as denial-of-service campaigns -DDoS-) on a large scale, but with a level of sophistication and speed of expansion much greater than we knew until now.
This network mainly enslaves connected devices belonging to the Internet of Things, such as routers and remote cameras. Experts at the end of September detected a “growing number of attempts” to exploit the vulnerabilities of this class of objects in order to add them to this network.
In this sense, these faults allowed to infect wireless IP cameras from manufacturers such as GoAhead, D-Link, TP-Link, Avtech, Netgear, Mikrotik, Linksys or Synology, among others.
All this against the background, as we anticipated, of the disaster that the botnet ‘Mirai’ caused just a year ago, in October 2016. At that time, this network of bots took advantage of the computing capacity of the different infected computers to leave out of service to major US online services, from Netflix to Twitter, through the Reddit portal.
A variant of this threat, which emerged a few months later – in November of last year – also allowed the luxury of disconnecting up to 900,000 routers from Deutsche Telekom in what was an impressive campaign to leave millions of users offline.
So, what do you think about this? Simply share your views and thoughts in the comment section below.
