Three years after the Mirai botnet launched some of the biggest denial of service attacks ever seen, DDoS is a bigger problem and ever. Even worse: we stand on the made up of webcams and other Internet of things as technologies like 5G bring greater bandwidth to connected endpoints. In this podcast, we speak with Hardik Modi, the senior director of threat intelligence at the firm NetScout Systems* about the lessons from his company’s latest threat intelligence report.
The three 20-something-year-old creators of the Mirai botnet have cooperated with the federal investigators on their case to avoid jail time. The three men–Paras Jha, 22, of Fanwood, New Jersey; Josiah White, 21, of Washington, Pennsylvania; and Dalton Norman, 22, of Metairie, Louisiana–were sentenced by a federal judge in Alaska to serve a five-year period of probation, perform 2,500 hours of community service, and pay restitution in the amount of $127,000. They also have voluntarily abandoned significant amounts of cryptocurrency seized during the course of the investigation. Jha White, and Norman also have another caveat to their sentences–they have to continue to provide relevant info on cybercrime and cybersecurity investigations to the FBI and to the greater security research community at large, something they’ve already been doing to keep themselves out of jail for their crimes, according to a press release on their sentencing. “The plea agreement with the young offenders […]
BitDefender has identified a new fast-spreading IoT botnet called Hide and Seek that has the potential to perform information theft for espionage or extortion.
Researchers at the security firm CheckPoint are warning that code to attack a vulnerability in Huawei HG532 home routers has been leaked online and is linked to attacks by the Satori botnet.
Research from the firm Akamai finds cyber criminals are marrying vulnerable home routers to sophisticated “fast flux” command and control tools to create long-lived, cyber criminal infrastructure.
