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Author of BrickerBot Malware Retires, Says He Bricked 10 Million IoT Devices (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The author of BrickerBot -- the malware that bricks IoT devices -- has announced his retirement in an email to Bleeping Computer, also claiming to have bricked over 10 million devices since he started the "Internet Chemotherapy" project in November 2016. Similar to the authors of the Mirai malware, the BrickerBot developer dumped his malware's source code online, allowing other crooks to profit from his code. The code is said to contain at least one zero-day. In a farewell message left on hundreds of hacked routers, the BrickerBot author also published a list of incidents (ISP downtimes) he caused, while also admitting he is likely to have drawn the attention of law enforcement agencies. "There's also only so long that I can keep doing something like this before the government types are able to correlate my likely network routes (I have already been active for far too long to remain safe). For a while now my worst-case scenario hasn't been going to jail, but simply vanishing in the middle of the night as soon as some unpleasant government figures out who I am," the hacker said.

3 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what a maroon by BronsCon · · Score: 3, Funny

    He'll just hack the city's smartlock!

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  2. Re:what a maroon by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Funny

    If you want to call that hacking. Most likely the telnet port was left open with a root password of 'password'. It could be worse, if it were intel management engine, it would have an empty root password.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  3. Headline should read: Author of BrickerBot Malware by Narcocide · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... finally gets a job.