The botnet took a particular aim at Dyn, a DNS service based in New Hampshire, in the end effecting PayPal, Reddit, Netflix, Twitter, and many more popular services. Other websites saw traffic to their websites go as high as 1 Tbps. His web servers received botnet traffic as a high as 620 Gbps. This DDoS attack started by going after KrebsOnSecurity, a website created by cyber security journalist, Brian Krebs. Related Article: CCleaner Supply Chain Attack Exposes Millions Of Windows Users Mirai ultimately enlisted over 100,000 devices causing the normal traffic load on target servers to exceed capacity by 10 to 20 times and creating the largest DDoS attack ever seen. Each of these devices was then used as a bot to request small amounts of bandwidth from target websites.
Ultimately, Mirai crashed much of the internet by creating a botnet out of Linux IoT devices with little or no password protection, such as unprotected IP Cameras and home routers. Since then, we’ve had WannaCry, NotPetya and the Equifax breach occupy the news and it seems like cyber attacks are becoming common place. A lot has happened since that day in October 2016 when much of the internet crashed as Mirai took down swaths of web servers residing on the East Coast of the United States. Remember Mirai? I don’t blame you if you can’t. Will it wreak havoc on the Internet, or can we stop it in its tracks? The spiritual successor to the Mirai botnet is now looming inside millions of IoT devices.