BrickerBot, the Permanent Denial-of-Service Botnet, Is Back With a Vengeance (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: BrickerBot, the botnet that permanently incapacitates poorly secured Internet of Things devices before they can be conscripted into Internet-crippling denial-of-service armies, is back with a new squadron of foot soldiers armed with a meaner arsenal of weapons. Pascal Geenens, the researcher who first documented what he calls the permanent denial-of-service botnet, has dubbed the fiercest new instance BrickerBot.3. It appeared out of nowhere on April 20, exactly one month after BrickerBot.1 first surfaced. Not only did BrickerBot.3 mount a much quicker number of attacks -- with 1,295 attacks coming in just 15 hours -- it used a modified attack script that added several commands designed to more completely shock and awe its targets. BrickerBot.1, by comparison, fired 1,895 volleys during the four days it was active, and the still-active BrickerBot.2 has spit out close to 12 attacks per day. Shortly after BrickerBot.3 began attacking, Geenens discovered BrickerBot.4. Together, the two newly discovered instances have attempted to attack devices in the research honeypot close to 1,400 times in less than 24 hours. Like BrickerBot.1, the newcomer botnets are made up of IoT devices running an outdated version of the Dropbear SSH server with public, geographically dispersed IP addresses. Those two characteristics lead Geenens to suspect the attacking devices are poorly secured IoT devices themselves that someone has compromised and used to permanently take out similarly unsecured devices. Geenens, of security firm Radware, has more details here.

Comments

Looking at my firewall logs

[Zocalo]

Looking at my firewall logs I think BrickerBot v3.0 may have actually been unleashed on the 18th, not the 20th. There was a huge decline in scanning for port 5358 that started on the 18th, which is now less than half the activity level it was at on the 17th, and less than 15% of the levels it was peaking at prior to BrickerBot v1.0. There are further, but smaller, falls in some of the other typical IoT ports like 2323 that started around the same time as well.

If you're reading, Janit0r (or whatever your current pseudonym is), keep up the good work! Might be worth taking a look at what's going on with Port 81 as well... Just sayin' :)