Mirai Botnet Attacks Post Office Broadband
Posted by: Timothy Weaver on 12/02/2016 09:54 AM
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An estimated 100,000 customers of Post Office broadband appear to be affected by an outage similar to that which befell Deutsche Telekom.
Deutsche Telekom had service interruptions that affected approximately 900,000 customers over the November 26 weekend. Investigators found that the interruptions were because of a variant of the Mirai malware.
Post Office may not be the only service that has been affected as TalkTalk is also experiencing outages.
Mirai DDoS attacks have been massive as reported by Krebs on Security, Dyn DNS, and the country wide outage of the African nation of Liberia.
The botnet is built on devices such as cameras, recorders and vulnerable routers. The attack on Deutsche Telekom may have been an attempt to build on the slaved devices.
Pavel Šrámek, malware analyst at Avast, said: “many Post Office customers have now experienced what a problem an insecure router can be, first-hand. However, it is safe to say that this might be just the beginning of what could happen in the future. The next step for attackers could be to hack into other home devices once they gain access to the router, like webcams, smart TVs, or thermostats.”
Jonathan Sander, VP of product strategy at Lieberman Software, speaking on the apparent target of these attacks, said: “Using a DDoS style shut-down to focus attention in one place while your pocket is picked from another is a tactic bad guys have used for a long time. It could be that these new Mirai shut-down attacks are a new way to achieve the same ‘distract and steal' combination.”
Source: SCMagazine
Deutsche Telekom had service interruptions that affected approximately 900,000 customers over the November 26 weekend. Investigators found that the interruptions were because of a variant of the Mirai malware. Post Office may not be the only service that has been affected as TalkTalk is also experiencing outages.
Mirai DDoS attacks have been massive as reported by Krebs on Security, Dyn DNS, and the country wide outage of the African nation of Liberia.
The botnet is built on devices such as cameras, recorders and vulnerable routers. The attack on Deutsche Telekom may have been an attempt to build on the slaved devices.
Pavel Šrámek, malware analyst at Avast, said: “many Post Office customers have now experienced what a problem an insecure router can be, first-hand. However, it is safe to say that this might be just the beginning of what could happen in the future. The next step for attackers could be to hack into other home devices once they gain access to the router, like webcams, smart TVs, or thermostats.”
Jonathan Sander, VP of product strategy at Lieberman Software, speaking on the apparent target of these attacks, said: “Using a DDoS style shut-down to focus attention in one place while your pocket is picked from another is a tactic bad guys have used for a long time. It could be that these new Mirai shut-down attacks are a new way to achieve the same ‘distract and steal' combination.”
Source: SCMagazine
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