Krebs Pinpoints the Likely Author of the Mirai Botnet (engadget.com)

The Mirai botnet caused serious trouble last fall, first hijacking numerous IoT devices to make a historically massive Distributed Denial-Of-Service (DDoS) attack on KrebsOnSecurity's site in September before taking down a big chunk of the internet a month later. But who's responsible for making the malware? From a report on Engadget: After his site went dark, security researcher Brian Krebs went on a mission to identify its creator, and he thinks he has the answer: Several sources and corroborating evidence point to Paras Jha, a Rutgers University student and owner of DDoS protection provider Protraf Solutions. About a week after attacking the security site, the individual who supposedly launched the attack, going by the username Anna Senpai, released the source code for the Mirai botnet, which spurred other copycat assaults. But it also gave Krebs the first clue in their long road to uncover Anna Senpai's real-life identity -- an investigation so exhaustive, the Krebs made a glossary of cross-referenced names and terms along with an incomplete relational map.

Comments

Re:How about the link directly to Krebs?

[DrXym]

Engadget suck. They digest stories and then bury the original source link amongst many others, most of which point back into their own site. They should be banned as the source of any story they didn't originate themselves.

sounds like a foreigner

[Anonymous Coward]

a southeast asian, there's a surprise. Those guys have no morals.

Re:Nothing like a good old fashioned witch hunt.

[amicusNYCL]

Yeah it really sucks when you find out that someone investigating all of the murders in town notices that the bloody footprints keep leading to your door.

If he didn't want to go down for this then he shouldn't have done it. I probably have more respect for Brian Krebs than any other journalist, he's obviously not infallible but his investigations and articles are great pieces of work. After reading the article, it seems pretty unlikely that there is another person in that small group of people who are connected which is actually the author but somehow didn't get noticed by Krebs. Jha admitted that the author of the botnet is a sociopath, so he's at least self-aware, but I'm not going to shed any tears for him when the FBI comes calling again. His attacks have run into the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, and he's directly negatively impacting the lives of many other people. If you want to try to poke holes in any of Krebs' arguments then go ahead, but if you haven't even read his article then it's probably better to save your witch hunt cliche for a time when it applies.