Expert: IoT Botnets the Work of a ‘Vast Minority’
Summary: Allison Nixon, director of security research at Flashpoint, told KrebsOnSecurity that the December 2017 indictments and guilty pleas of three men behind the Mirai malware were a good start but that IoT botnets remain a crime problem private citizens cannot stop. She said the vast majority of Mirai attacks, infrastructure, variants and exploits come from a vast minority of people, and that releasing the Mirai source code was the most harmful act because it drew researchers and spawned copycat botnets.
What you should know: Nixon's estimate that only about a dozen people drive DDoS innovation means identifying and attributing those individuals to law enforcement shrinks the problem dramatically - but she also notes the actors get more technically proficient over time and were only caught after going deep, so the window between capability and consequence keeps widening.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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