The Mirai Botnet: How a Few College Kids Broke the Internet with Your Security Camera
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...