How Vigilante Hackers Could Stop the Internet of Things Botnet
In the last few weeks, the internet has witnessed some of the worst cyberattacks ever.
All these attacks have been powered by a zombie army, or botnet, of easy-to-hack internet-connected devices such as cameras and DVRs, infected with an amateurish but extremely effective malware called Mirai.
On Friday, this string of attacks culminated with three different assaults on a company that provides web services for giants such as Twitter, Netflix and Spotify. The attacks, commonly known as distributed denial of service, or DDoS attacks, took those sites intermittently offline throughout the day. The worst part of this story is that no one really knows exactly how to stop something like this from happening again.
