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takyon writes:

A few hundred thousand cameras want to talk to you:

A hacker has released computer source code that allows relatively unsophisticated people to wage the kinds of extraordinarily large assaults that recently knocked security news site KrebsOnSecurity offline and set new records for so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks.

KrebsOnSecurity's Brian Krebs reported on Saturday that the source code for "Mirai," a network of Internet-connected cameras and other "Internet of things" devices, was published on Friday. Dale Drew, the chief security officer at Internet backbone provider Level 3 Communications, told Ars that Mirai is one of two competing IoT botnet families that have recently menaced the Internet with record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks—including the one that targeted Krebs with 620 gigabits per second of network traffic, and another that hit French webhost OVH and reportedly peaked at more than 1 terabit per second. [...] According to Krebs, the Mirai source code was posted to the hacking community HackForums by a user with the handle Anna-senpai. Krebs said the leaker provided the following explanation:

When I first go in DDoS industry, I wasn't planning on staying in it long. I made my money, there's lots of eyes looking at IOT now, so it's time to GTFO. So today, I have an amazing release for you. With Mirai, I usually pull max 380k bots from telnet alone. However, after the Kreb [sic] DDoS, ISPs been slowly shutting down and cleaning up their act. Today, max pull is about 300k bots, and dropping.

Previously: A Source for Recent DDoS Attacks

Original Submission