Last year, the Mirai botnet harnessed a legion of badly secured internet of things devices and turned them into a denial of service superweapon that brought down critical pieces of internet infrastructure (and even a country), and now its creators have entered guilty pleas to a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act federal case, and explained that they created the whole thing to knock down Minecraft servers that competed with their nascent Minecraft hosting business.

In 2016, an Internet of Things worm called Mirai tore through the internet, building botnets of millions of badly designed CCTVs, PVRs, routers and other gadgets, sending unstoppable floods of traffic that took down major internet services from Paypal to Reddit to Dyn.

Last October, floods of traffic from Internet of Things devices infected by the Mirai worm brought down several high profile internet services, from Level 3 to Dyn to Twitter and Reddit.

The Mirai worm made its way into information security lore in September, when it was identified as the source of the punishing flood of junk traffic launched against Brian Krebs in retaliation for his investigative reporting about a couple of petty Israeli criminals; subsequent analysis showed Mirai to be amateurish and clumsy, and despite this, it went on to infect devices all over the world, gaining virulence as it hybridized with other Internet of Things worms, endangering entire countries, growing by leaps and bounds, helped along by negligent engineering practices at major companies like Sony.

The unprecedented denial-of-service attacks powered by the Mirai Internet of Things worm have harnessed crappy, no-name CCTVs, PVRs, and routers to launch unstoppable floods of internet noise, but it's not just faceless Chinese businesses that crank out containerloads of vulnerable, defective-by-design gear — it's also name brands like Sony.

The Mirai worm — first seen attacking security journalist Brian Krebs with 620gbps floods, then taking down Level 3, Dyn and other hardened, well-provisioned internet giants, then spreading to every developed nation on Earth (and being used to take down some of those less-developed nations) despite being revealed as clumsy and amateurish (a situation remedied shortly after by hybridizing it with another IoT worm) — is now bigger than ever, and you can rent time on it to punish journalists, knock countries offline, or take down chunks of the core internet.

Andrew Wodzianski is a DC-area artist whose work often riffs off of nerdy pop cultural touchstones and ephemera. His pieces make references to comic books, 8-bit video games, monster movies, and tabletop gaming.

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, September 28, 1987, he created pieces of meme-styled art that draw inspiration from the Star Trek coloring books and ship blueprints of his youth. — Read the rest

• 'Fronton' is the FSB's IoT botnet project

A hacker calling themself Light Leafon who claims to be a 14-year-old is responsible for a new IoT worm called Silex that targets any Unix-like system by attempting a login with default credentials; upon gaining access, the malware enumerates all mounted disks and writes to them from /dev/random until they are filled, then it deletes the devices' firewall rules and removes its network config and triggers a restart — this effectively bricks the device, rendering it useless until someone performs the complex dance needed to download and reinstall the device's firmware.

The Mirai and Reaper botnets were just the beginning. xkcd's graph on the fragility of IoT systems is a warning of things to come.

The Security Innovation Center is a lobbying group backed by CompTIA, CTIA, TechNet and the Consumer Technology Association for the express purpose of fighting laws that would legalize repairing your own property, or choosing to have it repaired by third parties.

The amazing and frightening thing about the Mirai botnet's reign of terror wasn't that it was a super-sophisticated cyberweapon: rather, it was a clumsy, amateurish fuggly hack that turned out to have been produced by a couple of dum-dums with a Minecraft racket.

Whoever created the Wcry ransomware worm — which uses a leaked NSA cyberweapon to spread like wildfire — included a killswitch: newly infected systems check to see if a non-existent domain is active, and if it is, they fall dormant, ceasing their relentless propagation.

The anonymous individual behind the must-follow Internet of Shit Twitter account now has a column in The Verge, and has devoted 1,500 words to documenting all the ways in which Apple's signature walled-garden approach to technology has created an Apple Home IoT platform that is not only manifestly totally broken, but also can't be fixed until Apple decides to do something about it — and once you opt for Apple, you can forget about plugging in anything Apple hasn't greenlit, meaning that your choice of smartphone will determine what kind of toaster and lightswitch you're allowed to connect to your smarthome.

The Mirai Worm is a seemingly unstoppable piece of malware that targets the garbage-security Internet of Things gadgets that have proliferated through the world; these gadgets then used to deliver equally unstoppable floods of traffic that endanger whole countries.

It's been more than a year since RSA's Rotem Kerner published his research on the insecurities in a PVR that was "white labeled" by TVT, a Chinese company and sold under over 70 brand-names around the world. In the intervening year, tens of thousands of these devices have been hijacked into botnets used by criminals in denial of service attacks, and TVT is still MIA, having done nothing to repair them.

A DDoS attack that incidentally affected the internet connections for at least two housing blocks in Lappeenranta, Finland caused their heating systems to shut down, leaving their residents without heat in subzero weather.

The various Mirai botnets, which use "clumsy, amateurish code to take over even more clumsy and amateurish CCTVs, routers, PVRs and other Internet of Things devices, have been responsible for some eye-popping attacks this season: first there was the 620Gbps attack on journalist Brian Krebs (in retaliation for his coverage of a couple of petty Israeli crooks); then there was the infrastructure attack that took out Level 3, Netflix, Twitter, Dyn, and many more of the internet's best-defended services.

Linux/IRCTelnet is a new strain of Internet of Things malware that borrows its password-guessing routines from Mirai, the malware that helped take down Paypal, Netflix and Twitter, and adds them to the scanning routines from a newer IoT bot called Bashlight.

A China-based maker of surveillance cameras said Monday it will recall some products sold in the United States after a massive "Internet of Things" malware attack took down a major DNS provider in a massive DDOS attack. The stunningly broad attack brought much internet activity to a halt last Friday. — Read the rest