You can now rent an army of malicious robots for a small fee
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Last week, the Evizone blog introduced you to the growing safety concerns regarding unencrypted Internet of Things (IoT) devices. For the owners of the devices, a hack can mean a complete infiltration of a digital network, leaving all their data vulnerable.
But the threat to corporations is just as dire. More details emerged this week on the growing prevalence of Botnet attacks.
According to Motherboard,
“Two hackers appear to have created a new powerful zombie army of hacked Internet of Things devices with a modified version of the infamous malware Mirai. The cybercriminals are offering the powerful botnet to anyone who’s willing to pay to launch crippling distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyberattacks.
…
[They] claim to have improved Mirai to infect new devices—mostly routers. This new variant gives them the ability to potentially harvest hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of new bots, according to security researchers.
One of the two hackers behind this new Mirai variant said they have control over one million hacked devices.”
That’s right, an army of dormant televisions, computers, smart lamps, WiFi enabled refrigerators, and other common household items are being offered to anyone willing to pay for it. To mount an attack, the hackers use these devices to overload a target’s network, shutting them down completely. The hackers offer different price plans, according to Motherboard.
“For as little as $2,000, the hacker said, a customer can rent 20,000 to 25,000 nodes to launch intermittent one-hour long attacks over the span of two weeks, with 15 minutes of “cooldown” time between attacks. For $15,000 or $20,000, customers can get 600,000 bots to launch 2-hour-long attacks with 30 or 15 minutes of “cooldown” time. This costlier package gives customers 700 gbps of traffic or more, according to the hacker.”
For companies vulnerable to attacks, this is very concerning information. It’s quite difficult to ward off such cyberthreats, and an attack can lead to permanent damage and data loss.
These types of hacks have brought down websites and apps as large as Twitter and Spotify. And Botnet networks like the one described above are only getting more powerful.
The best practice for any company is to make sure that vulnerable data is secured and encrypted using software like Evizone’s. This ensures that an attack would never expose sensitive information to anyone who shouldn’t have access to it.
About Evizone Ltd.
Evizone Ltd. is a revolutionary secure communications, encryption and compliance software and service provider based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Evizone offers innovative enterprise solutions in secure messaging (next generation beyond encrypted e mail) and encryption, encryption at rest, regulatory compliance, compliance archiving, WORM compliance, 17a-4 compliance, document life cycle management and communications governance and risk management. Evizone’s services protect organizations through best in class security, encryption, recipient controls, document life cycle management, discovery management, compliance management, compliance archiving, tamper proof WORM and 17a-4 compliance archiving and complete audit records against the enormous damage caused by communications breaches. Evizone’s patented technologies offer a level of security impossible to obtain with conventional or encrypted email and fast, powerful, user friendly compliance archiving. Evizone’s services are immediately available on multiple platforms and provide the strongest commercially available communications security and compliance archiving. You can follow Evizone on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Contact:
Tom Kott, HATLEY Strategy Advisors, 514.316.7082, tkott@hatleystrategies.com
