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

Re:Time to outlaw the IoT

[JaredOfEuropa]

So we ban routers? After all a big chunk of that botnet consisted of hacked DT routers, and those are "things" too. Instead of outlawing the IoT, we should refrain from casually using the term IoT. To some it means sensor networks, to some it means autonomous machine to machine interactions, to some it means connected smart home devices like toasters, light bulbs and IP cameras, but others would exclude the cameras from that list.

So when another bone-shatteringly ignorant reporter mentions "botnet of IoT devices", smack him around the head with a large trout until he mentions which devices were actually compromised. Types and brands of devices, devices running a certain kind of OS or firmware, or using a specific iOt platform / board / chip. And if you tell us that the IoT is a stupid idea, please enlighten us and let us know which "things" should be kept off the internet.

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."

Re:Punishable by death

[houghi]

If two dickheads can do it, the problem is not the dickheads. If there are things that are dangerous, you see to it that they are not dangerous any more. You force companies to deal with safety. You say they are not allowed to put lead in their paint. You tell them to put safety belts in their cars. You see that they put safety measures in online devices.

Instead you allow the agency that has knowledge of problems to not solve the issue they find, but instead keep them hidden and not care if others use them,

The issue IS the guys funded at state level. They are called the NSA. And they ARE involved. And they wouldn't want it any other way. Killing two dickheads does not change that. Killing all the dickheads does not change that.

So yes, it DOES sound outrageous, because they are just dickheads. Get the frogs that allow this to happen. They are HAPPY if all you do is kill of some dickheads, because that means they can keep doing whjat they have been doing all along, they that they can fuck up up the economy, crippling emergency services and police response, interfering with hospitals, and hampering commerce in general. It will just not be their countries, but the others country, which ever that may be.