TECHBYTE: Over the week , someone just used Mirai Botnet
to knock the entire country offline. The attack was done on a small
African country Liberia sending it almost entirely offline each time.Botnet 14 also known as Mirai Botnet was responsible for this attack.
Mirai is a piece of malware designed to hijack busybox systems
(commonly used on IoT devices) in order to perform DDoS attacks. It
turns computer systems running Linux into remotely controlled "bots",
that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks.
It uses the insecure Internet of Things devices and directs a massive
amount of traffic to an online service or website. Some days ago
the cyber attack on Dyn DNS that resulted in shutting down of many popular websites like Reddit, GitHub, and Netflix.
Now someone is trying to take down the whole
Internet of a country by launching massive distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks using a botnet of insecure IoT devices
infected by the Mirai malware. Now it appears that Mirai knocked an entire country offline using another Mirai IoT botnet known as Botnet 14.
Why someone tried this attack on a little-known country Liberia whose population is around 4.5 million and where fewer than 10 per cent of its citizens have Internet access and the
entire country is served by just two companies that share a single fiber
optic cable. There is a possibility that someone is just testing the Mirai botnet’s capabilities.
Security researcher Kevin Beaumont was one of the first peoples to notice this attack and wrote about this attack-
“Shadows Kill” — Mirai DDoS botnet testing large scale attacks, sending threatening messages about UK and attacking researchers.
Kevin names it as " Shadows Kill".
Now Mirau Botnet has been open source so anyone can use it . Liberia
may be an example of knowing the capabilities of Mirai . The next step
could be the entire continent or could have much bigger target.
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