A Student (former) from Rutgers University and two other men were found guilty to create a Mirai Botnet that was used to disrupt services of thousands of websites in 2016. It is said that the three men used to infect 100s of thousands of web-connected devices including CCTV cameras and webcams, which were then turned into bots that launched Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Cyber Attacks.
Paras Jha (21) of Fanwood, New Jersey, and Dalton Norman (21) of Metairie, Louisiana, Josiah White is the accused who pleaded one count guilty in the Federal Court’s of Alaska and New Jersey this month. The three admitted to the crime of launching several Mirai Botnet attacks including the service disruption of Dyn, PayPal, Spotify, Holdings Inc, Twitter and Netflix in October 2016.
Jha and Norman have also pleaded guilty in a separate conspiracy incident where a powerful botnet was used in a click fraud scheme, used to artificially generate advertising revenue by making it appear legitimate clicks done on real online ads.
Cybersecurity Insiders learned that an investigation was taken up by the cybercrime unit of Anchorage, Alaska led to the arrests of the said three men.
Note- Mirai, a Japanese word is a malware that turns networked devices into remotely controlled bots that can be used as a botnet to conduct large-scale network attacks. The botnet is primarily used to target web-connected devices such as IP Cameras, Home Routers, and other IoT based devices. Early this year, the source code of Mirai is available as an open source in hackers’ forum resulting in its usage in other malware projects.
