Old Mirai bot appears in new, more destructive variant

A known malware Mirai in a new variant is designed to infect Internet of Things (IoT) devices facilitating even unskilled online manipulators to gain hold over innumerable such devices. Not only that, it also works to run extremely destructive DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) assaults not found hitherto.

A botnet, which propagates on its own, Mirai is a creation of Dalton Norman, Josiah White and Paras Jha as it primarily attacks IoT gadgets, notably IP cameras, online video recorders, and routers, converting these into "bots" familiarly used for executing large-scale DDoS assaults. The botnet creators seemingly spent a good time adding fresh exploits to Mirai's older versions thus upgrading it to the latest form.

The Mirai band received a sentence of completing probation spanning 5-yrs while also committing to community service of 2,500 hrs, along with paying a restitution of $127K and further giving up its crypto-currency funds confiscated at the time of investigation. In October, a sentence was imposed on Paras Jha while ordered for paying $8.6m as
restitution as well as spending 6-months in home confinement, states a release by DOJ dated October 26, 2018.

Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks state that the latest Mirai botnet utilizes a total of 27 exploits, with eleven of them wholly fresh to the bot. These exploits help to hack multi-featured IoT gadgets along with networking equipments. Mirai now also carries expanded default credentials it uses for hacking the gadgets which function with default passwords. Mirai's default credentials are added with 4 fresh combinations of usernames and passwords, the researchers report. www.zdnet.com posted this, March 18, 2019.

Mirai's current objective and mode of operation are identical to those of its earlier variants. The Mirai-contaminated gadgets scan online to find other IoT gadgets that have open Telnet ports as well as utilize their default credentials for hacking into and compromising those newer gadgets.

The researchers also discovered that the new Mirai variant detected this January, in addition to targeting online video cameras, routers, wireless controllers and modem routers, now even searches and exploits WePresent WiPG-1000 Wireless Presentation machines and Supersign TVs installed at enterprises.

» SPAMfighter News - 3/20/2019