The criminal creator of the Mirai backdoor has released the source code for the Trojan botnet which was used in the attack against Brian Krebs. The massive campaign against him is the biggest DDOS attack against in individual.
Mirai Source Code now Public
The code for the infamous Mirai botnet Trojan has been released by a computer criminal. It has been posted online for all to access. The malicious Trojan infects Internet of Things (IoT) devices and recruits them into a botnet that is capable of launching devastating DDOS attacks.
The malware spreads to vulnerable devices by scanning for the profiles of the relevant devices. The majority of infections are caused by weak security measures – hardcoded passwords, factory default username and password combinations and risk configurations.
The appliances are affected by the code’s exploits and recruited into the worldwide botnet that the criminal hackers use. The attack commands are issued by the operator through a central malicious remote source.
The code was published on a hacker forum by a user with the nickname “Anna-senpai”. There is no confirmation that is Mirai’s creator, however, many specialists believe that he is the responsible person for the devastating attack against Krebs. The Trojan is one of the most widely used malware for quick and effective attack campaigns using DDOS against large networks.
The infected systems can be protected from the threat by setting up good security configurations. Existing malware infections can be mitigated by rebooting the infected devices and clearing their memory from the malware code. Security experts worry that the public release of the source code will cause more botnet attacks as the criminal hackers will now have access to this formidable threat. If the botnet is adopted by the hackers, we could very well see attack campaigns that can easily surpass 1 million infected devices blasting DDOS packets against selected targets.
