Inside the infamous Mirai IoT Botnet: A Retrospective Analysis

Mirai, an infamous Internet-of-Things (IoT) botnet, was responsible for massive distributed denial-of-service attacks in 2016. At its peak, it infected over 600,000 vulnerable IoT devices and took down major websites like OVH, Dyn, and Krebs on Security. Mirai is a self-propagating worm that replicates itself by finding, attacking, and infecting vulnerable IoT devices. It was initially used for gamer wars but later evolved into multiple hacking groups running their own Mirai botnets after the source code was leaked. The rise of copycats made attributing attacks and discerning motives significantly harder. Notable targets included major websites, gaming platforms, booter services, and even an entire country's network. IoT devices pose a significant risk due to their insecure nature, and implementing basic security best practices like eliminating default credentials, making auto-patching mandatory, and implementing rate limiting can help mitigate the threat of future attacks.