Mirai botnet — Krebs on Security

Posts Tagged: Mirai botnet

Ne'er-Do-Well News — 65 Comments
19
Sep 18

Mirai Botnet Authors Avoid Jail Time

Citing “extraordinary cooperation” with the government, a court in Alaska on Tuesday sentenced three men to probation, community service and fines for their admitted roles in authoring and using “Mirai,” a potent malware strain used in countless attacks designed to knock Web sites offline — including an enormously powerful attack in 2016 that sidelined this Web site for nearly four days.

The men — 22-year-old Paras Jha Fanwood, New Jersey, Josiah White, 21 of Washington, Pa., and Dalton Norman from Metairie, La. — were each sentenced to five years probation, 2,500 hours of community service, and ordered to pay $127,000 in restitution for the damage caused by their malware.

Mirai enslaves poorly secured “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices like security cameras, digital video recorders (DVRs) and routers for use in large-scale online attacks.

Not long after Mirai first surfaced online in August 2016, White and Jha were questioned by the FBI about their suspected role in developing the malware. At the time, the men were renting out slices of their botnet to other cybercriminals.

Weeks later, the defendants sought to distance themselves from their creation by releasing the Mirai source code online. That action quickly spawned dozens of copycat Mirai botnets, some of which were used in extremely powerful denial-of-service attacks that often caused widespread collateral damage beyond their intended targets.

A depiction of the outages caused by the Mirai attacks on Dyn, an Internet infrastructure company. Source: Downdetector.com.

The source code release also marked a period in which the three men began using their botnet for far more subtle and less noisy criminal moneymaking schemes, including click fraud — a form of online advertising fraud that costs advertisers billions of dollars each year.

In September 2016, KrebsOnSecurity was hit with a record-breaking denial-of-service attack from tens of thousands of Mirai-infected devices, forcing this site offline for several days. Using the pseudonym “Anna_Senpai,” Jha admitted to a friend at the time that the attack on this site was paid for by a customer who rented tens of thousands of Mirai-infected systems from the trio.

In January 2017, KrebsOnSecurity published the results of a four-month investigation into Mirai which named both Jha and White as the likely co-authors of the malware. Eleven months later, the U.S. Justice Department announced guilty pleas by Jha, White and Norman. Continue reading →

Other — 44 Comments
4
Nov 16

Did the Mirai Botnet Really Take Liberia Offline?

KrebsOnSecurity received many a missive over the past 24 hours from readers who wanted to know why I’d not written about widespread media reports that Mirai — a malware strain made from hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices such as poorly secured routers and IP cameras — was used to knock the entire country of Liberia offline. The trouble is, as far as I can tell no such nationwide outage actually occurred.

First, a quick recap on Mirai: This blog was taken offline in September following a record 620 Gpbs attack launched by a Mirai botnet. The source code for Mirai was leaked online at the end of September. Since then, the code has been forked several times, resulting in the emergence of several large Mirai-based botnets. In late October, many of the Internet’s top destinations went offline for the better part of a day when Mirai was used to attack Internet infrastructure firm Dyn.

Enter Kevin Beaumont, a security architect from Liverpool, England who on Thursday published a piece on Medium.com about an attack by Mirai against Liberia. Beaumont had been researching the output of an automated Twitter account set up by security researchers to monitor attacks from these various Mirai botnets. That Twitter account, @MiraiAttacks, burps out a tweet with each new Mirai attack, listing the targeted Internet address, the attack type, and the observed duration of the attack.

Beamont’s story noted that a botnet based on Mirai was seen attacking the telecommunications infrastructure in the West African nation of Liberia. Citing anonymous sources, Beaumont said transit providers confirmed an attack of more than 500 Gpbs targeting Liberia’s lone underseas large-transit Internet cable, which Beaumont said “provides a single point of failure for internet access.”

“From monitoring we can see websites hosted in country going offline during the attacks,” Beaumont wrote. “Additionally, a source in country at a Telco has confirmed to a journalist they are seeing intermittent internet connectivity, at times which directly match the attack. The attacks are extremely worrying because they suggest a Mirai operator who has enough capacity to seriously impact systems in a nation state.”

Not long after Beamont’s story went live, a piece at The Hacker News breathlessly announced that hackers using Mirai had succeeded in knocking Liberia off the Internet. The Hacker News piece includes nifty graphics and images of Liberia’s underseas Internet cables. Soon after, ZDNet picked up the outage angle, as did the BBC and The Guardian and a host of other news outlets.

A graphic The Hacker News used to explain Liberia’s susceptibility to a DDoS attack.

The only problem that I can see with these stories is that there does not appear to have been anything close to a country-wide outage as a result of this Mirai attack.

Daniel Brewer, general manager for the Cable Consortium of Liberia, confirmed that his organization has fielded inquiries from news outlets and other interest groups following multiple media reports of a nationwide outage. But he could not point to the reason.

“Both our ACE submarine cable monitoring systems and servers hosted (locally) in LIXP (Liberia Internet Exchange Point) show no downtime in the last 3 weeks,” Brewer said. “While it is likely that a local operator might have experienced a brief outage, we have no knowledge of a national Internet outage and there are no data to [substantiate] that.” Continue reading →

Other — 150 Comments
3
Oct 16

Who Makes the IoT Things Under Attack?

As KrebsOnSecurity observed over the weekend, the source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released. Here’s a look at which devices are being targeted by this malware.

The malware, dubbed “Mirai,” spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default usernames and passwords. Many readers have asked for more information about which devices and hardware makers were being targeted. As it happens, this is fairly easy to tell just from looking at the list of usernames and passwords included in the Mirai source code.

In all, there are 68 username and password pairs in the botnet source code. However, many of those are generic and used by dozens of products, including routers, security cameras, printers and digital video recorder (DVRs).

I examined the less generic credential pairs and tried to match each with a IoT device maker and device type. As we can see from the spreadsheet above (also available in CSV and PDFformats), most of the devices are network-based cameras, with a handful of Internet routers, DVRs and even printers sprinkled in.

I don’t claim to have special knowledge of each match, and welcome corrections if any of these are in error. Mainly, I turned to Google to determine which hardware makers used which credential pairs, but in some cases this wasn’t obvious or easy.

Which is part of the problem, says Will Dormann, senior vulnerability analyst at the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC).

“Even when users are interested in and looking for this information, the vendor doesn’t always make it easy,” Dormann said.

Dormann said instead of hard-coding credentials or setting default usernames and passwords that many users will never change, hardware makers should require users to pick a strong password when setting up the device.

Indeed, according to this post from video surveillance forum IPVM, several IoT device makers — including Hikvision, Samsung, and Panasonic — have begun to require unique passwords by default, with most forcing a mix of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.

“As long as the password can’t be reversed — for example, an algorithm based off of a discoverable tidbit of information — that would be a reasonable level of security.” Dormann said. Continue reading →