Where the hacked things are

Akamai have just published an interesting summary of the Mirai distributed denial of service attack on the Internet Of Things*. Mirai appears to have heralded a new era of large scale attacks on the largely unprotected IOT devices that inhabit our homes and workplaces.

Akamai reported that Mirai is able to break into the devices using around 60 common username/password pairs, a fact which seems to highlight once again how vulnerable we leave ourselves if we don't even follow common sense security procedures. Not surprisingly, most of the botnet devices appear to be located in developing countries including Brazil, Vietnam, China, South Korea, Romania, Russia, and Taiwan:

Disturbingly, Akamai reported that Mirai is using a distributed command and control network to coordinate attacks by multiple botnets. This level of sophistication and control seems to indicate that its designers have a greater level of ambition and expertise than your average criminal gang.

*Reference: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/attack-spotlight-internet-of-things-botnet-threat-advisory.pdf