Someone Just Used The Mirai Botnet To Knock An Entire Country Offline
Last month, the Mirai botnet emerged from the shadows and directed its fury at security expert Brian Krebs. A few weeks later, the DNS servers at Dyn fell victim and many of the biggest sites on the Internet went dead for millions of Americans. Now it appears that Mirai knocked an entire country offline.
Only temporarily, mind you, and the target was a very small one: Liberia, with a population of around 4.5 million. Fewer than 10 per cent of its citizens have Internet access and the entire country is served by just two companies that share a single fiber optic cable. Who would want to DDoS a country like Liberia? One strong possibility is someone who’s testing the Mirai botnet’s capabilities.
The attack on Krebs’ website was easy enough to understand. He’s a respected security researcher and has doggedly pursued and helped expose numerous cybercriminals over the years. He’s been SWATTED. He’s had criminals send him narcotics in the mail in the hopes that he’d be wrongly arrested. It’s easy to see the kind of satisfaction one of his adversaries would get from knocking his site offline.
