The Mozi botnet, a peer-2-peer (P2P) malware known previously for taking over Netgear, D-Link and Huawei routers, has swollen in size to account for 90 percent of observed traffic flowing to and from all internet of things (IoT) devices, according to researchers.
IBM X-Force noticed Mozi’s spike within it’s telemetry, amid a huge increase in overall IoT botnet activity. Combined IoT attack instances from October through June is 400 percent higher than the combined IoT attack instances for the previous two years.
“Attackers have been leveraging these devices for some time now, most notably via the Mirai botnet,” according to IBM. “Mozi continues to be successful largely through the use of command-injection (CMDi) attacks, which often result from the misconfiguration of IoT devices. The continued growth of IoT usage and poor configuration protocols are the likely culprits behind this jump. This increase may have been fueled further by corporate networks being accessed remotely more often due to COVID-19.”
