According to a security researcher, a botnet with 100,000 routers is lying dormant on the web and could be used to launch cyber attacks any time by hackers. As per their research, the botnet is said to circulate Mirai malware and could be used as a source to propel a major attack.
Mirai malware is known to infect web connectivity enabled devices such as DVRs, WebCams, and thermostats. The said malware variant is now said to have infected more than 90,000 Huawei devices accompanied by 10K other devices.
As per the study made by Security researcher Dale Drew, Chief Security Strategists at CenturyLink, the said number of networked devices are now lying dormant with Mirai botnet.
Readers of Cybersecurity Insiders are requested to notify that Mirai malware has already been held responsible for causing biggest internet outages in the cyber-history, knocking big tech companies like ‘twitter’ last year.
It is said that the source code of the malware is now open-source and so is attracting attention from a large sect of black hat software developers.
Drew said that the operator of the said botnet could launch a crippling distributed denial of service attack against major website providers and is said to be offering it as a service. Means, any individual or hacking group could take the botnet of 100,000 infiltrated routers on lease to cyber attack servers or a computer network of a company in any part of the world.
As a precautionary measure, Century Linked owned Level 3 service provider has blocked communications between the devices to prevent control of the botnet by the operator. But this can be only treated as a temporary solution as the operator could use a new command and control server with a different configuration to launch a cyber attack.
