Tech Firms Team Up to Take Down ‘WireX’ Android DDoS Botnet
Summary: A half dozen technology and security companies jointly announced the takedown of WireX, a botnet of tens of thousands of hacked Android devices that grew from small attacks first spotted August 2, 2017 to taking down large hospitality industry websites within two weeks. Researchers tied the malware to roughly 300 apps on Google's Play store that performed their stated functions while quietly connecting infected devices to a control server, and Akamai's Chad Seaman said attack data showed 130,000 to 160,000 unique Internet addresses from over 100 countries.
Bottom line: WireX carried its own headless browser and encrypted attack traffic with SSL, so defenders had to decrypt packets before they could tell attack traffic from real mobile visitors - and the consortium's own report says hiding a DDoS is largely impossible, making silence with your vendor the costlier choice.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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- Malware
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