On October 21, 2016, Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, and CNN went dark simultaneously across the entire US east coast. Governments and security agencies braced for a nation-state cyberattack. It was three college students trying to win at Minecraft. The Short Version Paras Jha, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman built Mirai to knock rival Minecraft servers offline — a petty competitive advantage in a game economy. The weapon they built was anything but petty. Mirai worked by scanning the internet for IoT devices — security cameras, DVRs, home routers — still running factory default credentials. "admin/admin." "root/12345." "password." It tried 61 combinations. Most devices let it straight in. Within 20 hours of release, Mirai had infected 65,000 devices, doubling in size every 76 minutes. At its peak: over 600,000 hijacked devices. A botnet more powerful than anything ever assembled. Here's what it did with them: September 2016 : took down OVH...