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 Like BrickerBot.1, the newcomer botnets are made up of IoT devices running an outdated version of the Dropbear SSH server with public, geographically dispersed IP addresses.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

Do we still have consumer protection in America?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're stupid enough to buy broken devices... at least consumer protection laws lets you return the crap.

Do we still have those in Trump's America?

The fact that you cannot be sure if I'm joking or not should give you pause.

Re:I thought Linux was supposed to be secure?

[petermgreen]

The problem is threefold.

Firstly lack of updates, SoC vendors are notorious for porting one or two versions of Linux, throwing it over the wall to device vendors and then doing nothing to keep it up to date. Some SoCs can be use with upstream kernels but very often with reduced functionality. The device vendors in turn add their own customisations to that kernel that the SoC vendor threw over the wall. Quickly you end up with something that cannot reasonablly be updated to a new upstream version. It is possible to some extent to backport security fixes, but it's a lot of work so it is likely to get skipped entirely or at least restricted to the most-severe vulnerabilties.

Secondly the vendors doing the work often do it without really caring about security which can lead to busting big holes in the user-security model. Remember "exynos-mem"?

Thirdly if your application layer is full of holes then attackers will be able to get whatever privilages that application has. If that is root then the attacker has full control of the device. Even if it is not root the attacker may well be able to elavate to root due to the first and second points.