2.5 Million IoT Devices Infected by Malware Mirai

McAfee, an internet security solutions provider, reports that malware Mirai has infected as much as 2.5 Mn IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

The report reveals that Mirai is significant because it identifies and infects IoT devices which are poorly secured and transform them into bots to attack its targets. Around five IoT device IP addresses were added to Mirai botnets every minute at that time. Last year, this botnet was responsible for DDoS attack on Dyn, a main DND service provider, which was highly publicized. Thehindu.com posted on April 18th, 2017, stating that the attack had disabled major websites like Reddit and Twitter.

Marshal Webb, CTO of BackConnect, services provider for protecting against the DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks said "you can almost call it Mirai on steroids."

Security researchers dubbed rival Internet of Things malware Hajime; and it has been spreading unabated and creating a botnet since its discovery more than 6 months ago. Webb estimated that it has infected around 100.000 devices all over the world.

These botnets or the networks of computers that are enslaved can create problem. They are frequently used for launching huge DDoS attacks, which can down the websites or can even disrupt the infrastructure of the internet.

When the security researchers of Rapidity Networks are looking for the Mirai activity, in that month Hajime got first discovered. Instead they found something similar, although more tenacious.

The messages of spam email from top 10 botnets have dropped 24% in 4rth quarter to 181 Mn emails. They produced 934 Mn spam messages altogether in 2016. The report stated that the new malware samples number have slowed by 17% in the 4rth quarter, whereas overall count increased by 24% in the year 2016 to 638 Mn samples.

Security researchers claim that the best way to tackle this problem at its root to stop the malware is to patch the vulnerable IoT devices. However, that will consume more time and in other cases, it might not be even possible. Nixon said that some IOT vendors have released security patches for their products to stop malware infections but several others have not.

That means Mirai and Hajime will possibly stay around for a longer time, until those devices were retired.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/21/2017