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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.
He didn't do it to warn people about a potential threat. He did it to force manufacturers to pay more attention to security. He should be given the key to the fucking city.
No, he bricked broken IOT(S) devices to stop them from attacking others. A bricked device is harmless, and there's even hope it gets returned to manufacturer. On the other hand, one that's part of a blackhat botnet is bad for everyone.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Screw jail. This guy needs to be drawn and quartered.
Nonsense. Having guys like him probing our infrastructure is a lot better than leaving the holes wide open for Putin and Xi Jingping. He is providing a public service. It may not be pleasant when you get pwned, but flu shots aren't pleasant either.
He was doing more than probing. Anyone who thinks this bottom feeder was performing a public service is an idiot. And this guy will probably find out the retiring doesn't mean law enforcement will stop looking for him. And implying he would be "disappeared" is indicative of his warped view of reality. How many people have been "disappeared" for hacking? This guy, and people like him, are also responsible for giving law enforcement the political support needed to attach harsher penalties for these types of crimes.
(1) He's destroying devices that destroy privacy in themselves ... open Telnet ports
(2) He's destroying devices that are insecure by design
Not crying for the owners of this junk. He's indeed doing the Internet a service...
This guy is my hero.
Dumbass mainland Europeans think it's OK to write in English but not follow English numeric conversions resulting in documentation that either makes no sense or worse gives values that are plain wrong.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register