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Mirai Botnet Attackers Are Trying To Knock Liberia Offline (zdnet.com)
Zack Whittaker, reporting for ZDNet: One of the largest distributed denial-of-service attacks happened this week and almost nobody noticed. Since the cyberattack on Dyn two weeks ago, the internet has been on edge, fearing another massive attack that would throw millions off the face of the web. The attack was said to be upwards of 1.1 Tbps -- more than double the attack a few weeks earlier on security reporter Brian Krebs' website, which was about 620 Gbps 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 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 500 Gbps in size. Beaumont said that given the volume of traffic, it "appears to be the owned by the actor which attacked Dyn." An attack of that size is enough to flatten even a large network -- or as was seen this week, a small country. Update: 11/03 19:37 GMT: The title of the story (same as the ZDNet's story) was updated to mention the name of the country. The summary was updated to reflect the same, as well.
Re: "small, little-known African country": ... Seems like the author of the article could use a broader perspective.
-- Liberia has more land area than Portugal or Hungary or Austria.
-- Liberia is well-known to USers as a destination for freed slaves in the 19th century
You could do with some broader perspective too. Not everyone in the World is interested in a 19th century destination for freed US slaves, even if it interests some Americans as such. In the UK here I doubt that one person in 20 could point to it on a map or even know that it is in Africa. It did have a claim to fame once as having the largest fleet of merchant ships in the world (as a flag of convenience). Land area has nothing to do with it.
Oh, before you accuse me of narrow-mindedness, I am a bit exceptional in that I once had a Liberian GF, who claimed descent from those slaves, and said there was a lot of tension today between such descendants (who tend to form the upper classes) and the "natives" of Liberia because obviously the slaves did not neccesarily originate from Liberia. The ex-slaves were imposed on the natives by the USA in a fit of idealism; in fact it was a USA colony although that can only be whispered as the USA is supposed to be against colonialism. The capital Monrovia was named after the US president Monroe, and the flag is obviously inspired by the Stars and Stripes.
My GF said that the whole place is a shit-hole, in a state of more-or-less permanent civil war, gang warfare and broken infrastructure. She never wanted to go back there again.