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One More Massive Cyber Assault Bringing Down Internet of an Entire Country


The Mirai malware is being used in a cyber-crime for destabilizing the whole infrastructure of Liberia's Internet. This country of Africa was recently the target of that identical cyber-weapon with which the October DDoS attack in USA was executed as the biggest ever till date.

Mirai was employed last month for launching an enormous distributed denial-of-service assault which disrupted a few of the greatest websites and services operated globally. For the assault, an expanding network of contaminated IoT systems referred to as Internet-connected appliances was used which disbursed 1.1Tbps traffic.

The readily-obtainable Mirai malicious program has been the prime thing in both attacks. The malware lets miscreants infiltrate weakly-protected IoT devices like refrigerators, smart cameras, lightbulbs etc. After hacking such devices, the attacker transmits data from them onto a remote system, inundating its servers while making it unreachable for daily users.

The first Mirai attack was on Dyn the company which offers domain name services (DNS) for the operation of popular websites like Spotify and Twitter. The utility of DNS is its direction of Web-surfers to sites as they enter a URL into their browsers' address bar. Therefore, by destabilizing Dyn, an enormous portion of Internet went down. Mashable.com posted this, November 4, 2016.

The October denial-of-service assault, warned security experts, would be the beginning of numerous upcoming cyber-assaults that could be even bigger in scale. According to these experts, the upcoming DDoS assaults could produce up to 10Tbps traffic, sufficient for destroying a whole nation's Internet infrastructure.

Hackers by using Mirai have been building botnets from the time the malware's developers published its source code online during late-September. Some 500K weakly-protected Internet devices consisting of DVRs, surveillance cameras, among others, are estimated as being contaminated with Mirai.

It is yet not clear who the perpetrators of these DDoS assaults are; however, security researchers conjecture amateur hackers as being the culprits who run DDoS-for-hire facilities. The facilities are obtainable against payment for attacking targets, like a website or video game to make extortions.

An experimental botnet like Mirai rendered a whole nation offline; thus one can imagine the damage from any full-fledged cyber-assault.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/9/2016

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