Mirai botnet attackers are trying to knock an entire country (Liberia) offline

The nation state has a single point of failure fiber, recently installed in 2011, and it could spell disaster for dozens of other countries

The attack was said to be upwards of 1.1Tbps — more than double the attack a few weeks earlier on security reporter Brian Krebs’ website, which was about 620Gbps in size, said to be one of the largest at the time. The attack was made possible by the Mirai botnet, an open-source botnet that anyone can use, which harnesses the power of insecure Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

This week, another Mirai botnet, known as Botnet 14, began targeting a small, little-known African country, Liberia, sending it almost entirely offline each time.

Security researcher Kevin Beaumont, who was one of the first to notice the attacks and wrote about what he found, said that the attack was one of the largest capacity botnets ever seen.

One transit provider said the attacks were over 500Gbps in size. Beaumont said that given the volume of traffic, it “appears to be the owned by the actor which attacked Dyn”.

Source: Mirai botnet attackers are trying to knock an entire country offline

Robin Edgar

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