Last week’s cyber attack attributed to Mirai botnet

Our readers may recall an earlier report in which we covered the growing the threat of the Mirai super distributed denial of service botnet being deployed with malicious intent by unknown groups, who had boosted the threat by posting the coding on hacker forums.

The danger represented by Mirai is that it is capable of mustering myriad relatively “dumb” IoT (Internet of Things) devices as part of its DDoS assaults, creating hitherto unimagined volumes of data with which to bombard a targeted server.

The UK’s Guardian newspaper reported on the issue recently, noting that the Mirai attack earlier this month on Dyn, a major DNS infrastructure, impacted a wide range of internet services.

The attack was massively stronger than the 620-gigabits-second Mirai assembled in September this year in the assault on digital security news vendor Krebs, itself regarded as more than double that ever seen previously (see previous report).

Some reports estimated the volumes in the latest attack had reached an incredible 1.2 terabits-second.

Mirai, as is the case with all such malicious networks, represents a danger to online gambling operators because the industry has been identified as one of the favoured targets of the anonymous hackers behind these cyber-assaults. That due to its vulnerability during key tournament or sports events, when disruption can cause very significant loss of business.

Cyber security expert David Fidler was quoted by The Guardian in its article, warning:

“We have a serious problem with the cyber insecurity of IoT devices and no real strategy to combat it. The IoT insecurity problem was exploited on this significant scale by a non-state group, according to initial reports from government agencies and other experts about who or what was responsible. Imagine what a well-resourced state actor could do with insecure IOT devices.”

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