[Infowarrior] - Two plead guilty in development of Mirai cyberweapon

[Richard Forno]

Two plead guilty in development of Mirai cyberweapon

By Joe Uchill - 12/13/17 11:08 AM EST

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/364687-two-plead-guilty-in-development-of-mirai-cyberweapon

Two defendants have pleaded guilty to creating Mirai, a tool used to throw websites offline that was released to the public and eventually used against Twitter, The New York Times and Netflix. 

Paras Jha and Josiah White pleaded guilty to charges stemming from Mirai in Alaska last week, according to court documents unsealed on Tuesday. 

Mirai launches distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), coordinated floods of traffic so large they overwhelm victim's servers and force them to crash or severely slow. Mirai generated the traffic by creating networks of hacked internet-connected devices, like security cameras, and have each contact a target at the same time. 

Mirai served as an automated platform for hacking the devices and built networks so big they broke several records for the size of DDoS attacks. 

The most famous victims of the Mirai attacks were security journalist Brian Krebs and the internet infrastructure company Dyn. Dyn, which serves as a switchboard that connects users with sites such as Twitter, the New York Times, Netflix, Etsy and others, brought its clients down with it. 

Jha and White admitted to taking part in the design of Mirai, with Jha also admitting to participating in selling access to the botnet for others to use in attacks and promoting Mirai on criminal web forums. One of the accounts used to promote the service was "Ana Senpai," an account that eventually posted the source code for users to download for free.