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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Did the Mirai Botnet Really Take Liberia Offline?

Summary: A Mirai-based botnet launched an attack exceeding 500 Gbps against a mobile telecom provider in Liberia, but the Cable Consortium of Liberia's Daniel Brewer said its ACE submarine cable monitoring systems and locally hosted servers at the Liberia Internet Exchange Point showed no downtime in the last three weeks. Dyn and Akamai reported stable routing and only a dip in traffic from Liberia, with Dyn's Doug Madory stating neither company had data supporting a national outage claim.

Why it matters: Media outlets including The Hacker News, ZDNet, the BBC and The Guardian reported a country-wide outage that the operator's own monitoring data did not support - and the traffic dip Akamai saw may simply reflect Liberia's Thanksgiving holiday. The attack itself was real and exceeded 500 Gbps, but the provider's denial-of-service mitigation plan kicked in shortly after it began.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

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Malware
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