Noted security researcher Brian Krebs, who publishes on Krebs on Security, did a lot of digging over the last several months. He now believes to have uncovered the identity of the creator of the Mirai worm code, a strand of malware that infects Internet of Things devices and hijacks them for denial of service attacks.
In the second half of 2016, a number of very high-profile distributed denial of service attacks took down sites and set new records for the volume of traffic used. Perhaps the best-known attack was that on domain management company Dyn, which ended up taking down Reddit, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon and many other websites. An earlier, similar attack had taken down Krebs on Security, with over 620Gbps of traffic. Both of these were implemented by Mirai botnets.
Since the attack on his website, Krebs has done “hundreds of hours of research [..] seeking the missing link between seemingly unrelated people and events” into who launched these attacks and who’s behind the infamous Mirai botnet. He published his findings, which read like a cross between a noir movie and an investigative political thriller, on his website, citing all the information he’s gathered on the creator of the Mirai botnet, Anna Senpai, the same person that leaked the source code for the Mirai back in September.
The story is quite amazing, with twists and turns, betrayals between friends, a young talented person falling from grace and embracing the dark side, a recurrent theme of Minecraft servers and the ever-present glue that holds all of the characters and events together: money.
At the end of it all, Krebs believes to have discovered who Anna-senpai is – Pras Jha, a 20-year old from New Jersey - and how his involvement in ProTraf Solutions, an unethical DDoS protection company, ties everything in a somewhat neat bow. The story, though long, is definitely worth a read.
Unfortunately, even if Krebs managed to successfully uncover a number of cyber-criminals, the story doesn’t have that happy of an ending. Mirai and other software like it is very much out there, and there’s little anyone can do to put this particular genie back in its lamp. As Krebs himself notes:
"If you’ve ever wondered why it seems that so few Internet criminals are brought to justice, I can tell you that the sheer amount of persistence and investigative resources required to piece together who’s done what to whom (and why) in the online era is tremendous."
You can read the entire story for yourself and check out what the security researcher uncovered at the source link below.
Source: Krebs on Security
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