Fear the Reaper, or Reaper Madness?
Summary: Arbor Networks estimates the Reaper IoT botnet currently fluctuates between 10,000 and 20,000 bots, far below the one-million figure Check Point derived from a data set of a few hundred networks, 60% of which were being scanned. Reaper borrows code from Mirai but targets nine security holes across consumer and commercial products rather than factory-default credentials, and Arbor assesses it is likely built for a booter/stresser service serving the intra-China DDoS-for-hire market.
Bottom line: Arbor's scanners have already identified an additional 2 million hosts as potential Reaper nodes that have not been subsumed into the botnet, so the capacity for a far larger army exists even if the current count is 10,000 to 20,000.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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- Malware
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