- Jun 9, 2013
- 6,720
The Mirai botnet has been blamed for a cyber-attack which has knocked Liberia's internet offline.
According to The Telegraph, multiple attacks against Liberia's rudimentary internet infrastructure have taken the country's websites offline over the course of a week. It is believed that the cause of the outage is the Mirai botnet, the source code of which was releasedafter it hit the DNS provider Dyn.
Jonathan Sander, VP of product strategy at Lieberman Software, said that if this attack on Liberia's internet has come from a single source, it could be anyone with any small grudge.
“All this is fuelled by the simple mistake, fuelled by laziness, where regular people don't change their devices' default passwords,” he said. “It will be interesting to see what happens when this attack is turned on organizations who likely think they are safe, while in reality scores of devices connect happily to their networks with unchanged default passwords every minute of every day.”
Dave Larson, CTO and COO at Corero Network Security, said: “DDoS is killing internet service availability across the globe, and it is about time the ISP’s step up and take action. In the past providers have taken an agnostic stance and reverted to their primary role of just moving traffic.
“This approach is no longer acceptable, as the technology now exists to mitigate the scaled DDoS attacks that we are seeing from the Internet of Things – there just needs to be greater urgency in increasing the scale of the mitigation capacity and the use of the latest in-line, real-time, automated tools. It’s the Mirai code causing the major outages today, it will be a variation of that code, and new methods in the future.”
Stephen Gates, chief research intelligence analyst at NSFOCUS, said: “Researchers and analysts (like myself) have been warning organizations all over the world that this day would come, and now it’s here.
Read More. Mirai botnet blamed for Liberia being taken offline
According to The Telegraph, multiple attacks against Liberia's rudimentary internet infrastructure have taken the country's websites offline over the course of a week. It is believed that the cause of the outage is the Mirai botnet, the source code of which was releasedafter it hit the DNS provider Dyn.
Jonathan Sander, VP of product strategy at Lieberman Software, said that if this attack on Liberia's internet has come from a single source, it could be anyone with any small grudge.
“All this is fuelled by the simple mistake, fuelled by laziness, where regular people don't change their devices' default passwords,” he said. “It will be interesting to see what happens when this attack is turned on organizations who likely think they are safe, while in reality scores of devices connect happily to their networks with unchanged default passwords every minute of every day.”
Dave Larson, CTO and COO at Corero Network Security, said: “DDoS is killing internet service availability across the globe, and it is about time the ISP’s step up and take action. In the past providers have taken an agnostic stance and reverted to their primary role of just moving traffic.
“This approach is no longer acceptable, as the technology now exists to mitigate the scaled DDoS attacks that we are seeing from the Internet of Things – there just needs to be greater urgency in increasing the scale of the mitigation capacity and the use of the latest in-line, real-time, automated tools. It’s the Mirai code causing the major outages today, it will be a variation of that code, and new methods in the future.”
Stephen Gates, chief research intelligence analyst at NSFOCUS, said: “Researchers and analysts (like myself) have been warning organizations all over the world that this day would come, and now it’s here.
Read More. Mirai botnet blamed for Liberia being taken offline
