By Marcos Colon
The Mirai botnet is believed to be behind a portion of the sustained assaults that knocked DNS provider Dyn offline, affecting its clients which include Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter, according to cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs. Krebs’ site was impacted by the botnet, whose attacks have peaked at 799Gbps.
The botnet is made up of IoT devices that include digital video recorders and IP cameras. The malware propagates by scanning the Internet for insecure IoT devices and leveraging a list of more than 60 combinations of usernames and weak default passwords.
Once the malware author released the source code for the malware, the number of infected devices more than doubled.
