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 Like BrickerBot.1, the newcomer botnets are made up of IoT devices running an outdated version of the Dropbear SSH server with public, geographically dispersed IP addresses.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

Denial-of-Service?

[Anonymous Coward]

BrickerBot, the botnet that permanently incapacitates poorly secured Internet of Things devices

Denial-of-Service botnet? Sounds more like a Public-Service botnet to me.

Re:Denial-of-Service?

[GargamelSpaceman]

I would mod parent up if I could.

We made a big mistake when we made cracking into things illegal. We should have made cracking into things legal and made people put up impenetrable walls. This is computers and data. There are walls that anyone can put up that can keep out governments. This would have created demand for real security and by now we'd have it ubiquitously without trying.

I hope this guy doesn't get caught, and I appreciate and do not encourage his actions.

Re:Denial-of-Service?

[Opportunist]

While I generally agree, I cannot second the idea that it should be legal to break into computers that are insufficiently secured. That would make the internet an even worse place than it already is.

What we need is something like the famous FCC part 15 sticker rules. You know the ones, you can find it on pretty much any electronic device:
(1) This device may not cause harmful interference, and
(2) this device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation.

We need something like this for IoT devices.

BrickerBot

[Daetrin]

The hero the Internet of Things both deserves _and_ needs.

Re:BrickerBot

[sinij]

The hero the Internet of Things both deserves _and_ needs.

Yeah .. there's nothing like a vigilante of whom you approve.

Yes it is vigilante and we suppose to condemn such things. However, what the alternative? Internet Weather with DDoS storms routinely taking big chunks of it down? Markets completely failed to solve this problem, legislation isn't feasible considering international nature of this... so vigilante is least bad solution here.