Massive Mirai Botnet Hides Its Control Servers On Tor (bleepingcomputer.com)

"Following a failed takedown attempt, changes made to the Mirai malware variant responsible for building one of today's biggest botnets of IoT devices will make it incredibly harder for authorities and security firms to shut it down," reports Bleeping Computer. An anonymous reader writes: Level3 and others" have been very close to taking down one of the biggest Mirai botnets around, the same one that attempted to knock the Internet offline in Liberia, and also hijacked 900,000 routers from German ISP Deutsche Telekom.The botnet narrowly escaped due to the fact that its maintainer, a hacker known as BestBuy, had implemented a domain-generation algorithm to generate random domain names where he hosted his servers.

Currently, to avoid further takedown attempts from similar security firms, BestBuy has started moving the botnet's command and control servers to Tor. "It's all good now. We don't need to pay thousands to ISPs and hosting. All we need is one strong server," the hacker said. "Try to shut down .onion 'domains' over Tor," he boasted, knowing that nobody can.

Comments

Improve consumer firewalls

[davidwr]

It's time for consumer firewalls to be "block all by default" in all directions, not just WAN-to-LAN.

If you want to allow your thermostat to talk to a specific external host then punch a very narrow hole in the firewall to allow it.

Heck, I would go so far as to put everything on the LAN side in its own DMZ. If you want your PC to talk to your media player, punch a specific hole in the firewall.

This will require industry cooperation:
* Protocols will have to be developed so "punching holes in firewalls" becomes super-easy for the consumer
* ISPs will have to start telling customers "if bad things come out of your network, we WILL cut you off. If you use one of these new routers, it's much less likely that bad things will come out of your network."

Typical precursor to heavy-handed legislation

[golodh]

It's interesting to see history repeat itself (again). Years ago you had some very vocal pimply-faced youths who jeered about how they were illegally distributing copyrighted works (software, music, video, books. Stupid companies! No copyright protection, lame copyright protection ... easy meat !

Result ? Among others the DMCA. Various individuals were sued into bankruptcy by the music industry, just to show people what the risks were (remember single mother Jammie Thomas ? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) . Some were driven to suicide (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ).

What shouty nerds tend to forget is that (like it or not) they are part of a society that can (and does) sets certain limits on their behaviour. Which can be enforced. With or without their consent.

Tor routers can be a force for the good (avoiding censorship, protecting human rights activists, protecting investigative journalists) but they really _can_ be eradicated, given sufficient incentive.

Just outlaw the servers, force ISP's to scan all Internet traffic for TOR servers, log any connections and isolate / report them as soon as they're detected. Send a SWAT team to visit anyone who connects to a TOR server to seize their computers pending investigation. Set penalties sufficiently high to pay for all that and publicly sue a few tens of offenders into bankruptcy.

Should cow 99% of all TOR users, right? The 1% who aren't cowed are probably up to no good anyway.

A bit like China. Not pretty, and people won't like it, but it really can be enforced.

The detection and tracking part is already in place. Just consider the raft of deep-packet inspection routers that has been installed already (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ).

I'm not saying I'd like to see something like that (I wouldn't). All I'm saying is that stupid and venal abusers like this a**hole botnet operator make it that much more likely that something like that will occur. Whether we realise it or not. To the detriment of us all.