Three men plead guilty to creating Mirai botnet
A New Jersey man was just one of a trio who pled guilty to hacking charges and creating the devastating Mirai botnet, which spread via vulnerabilities in Internet-connected devices to unleash numerous massive distributed-denial-of-service attacks. As recently as last week, new Mirai strains continued to proliferate online.
In addition to Paras Jha of New Jersey, a press release issued by the Department of Justice at approximately 1:30pm ET also identified Josiah White, 20, of Washington, Pennsylvania and Dalton Norman, 21, of Metairie, Louisiana as being co-conspirators who also pled guilty.
As Ars reported in October 2016, the most serious DDoS degraded or completely took down Twitter, GitHub, the PlayStation network, and hundreds of other sites by targeting Dyn, a service that provided domain name services to the affected sites.