Or up against it at least.
You will no doubt all remember about the infamous Mirai Botnet, which rose and fell between 2016 and 2017.
Back in December 2017, the three brains behind the botnet; Josiah (Snow) White, Pamas (Happy) Jha and Dalton (Bashful) Norman pleaded guilty to both the Mirai and Clickfraud botnets.
It transpires that Jha (Bless, Bliss, Happy) wrote the Mirai code after being challenged to write something better than his existing masterpiece which was used primarily for taking out Minecraft players, a worthy cause if ever there was one.
Upon realising The Power of Mirai, the trio set about offering DDOS for hire, eventually publishing the source code in a failed attempt to hide, presumably down the BitCoin mines (Hi-HO!).
Having being nicked by The Feds, they proceeded to not just drop their pants and confess all, but to work seemingly tirelessly for the FBI in complex cyber crime investigations, earning praise during their sentencing hearing.
As well as being compelled to continue to work for The Government, the boys received five years probation, 2,500 hours of community service (presumably at the cyber coalface), and a $127,000 fine. They have also handed over at least some of their ill-gotten crypto currency gains.
Victims of Mirai takedowns will be very disappointed that no jail time was prescribed and that the whole exercise seems to be a recruitment drive. We think it proves that you can come back, even if you are a bad apple and wish the special agents well.
Doc, Happy, Sneezy and Sleepy remain at large. We all know where Grumpy is.
There have been quite a few rumblings coming from the users of the applications of RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank together with Barclays and TSB earlier in the week.
As regular readers will be well aware, we do believe in fairies, but not in Unicorns or coincidences. The grey sages of ITC Towers past, now over the seas, are suspicious that some common, perhaps aging technology subject to emergency patching or being attacked might be to blame. The good news is they all appear fixed and of course there is no cause for concern. None at all.
What the success of the Mirai botnet does show, is that it is not that difficult to takeover Internet of Ting Tings devices and use them for purposes nefarious. Our engineers are developing behavioural models to identify compromise in Operation Technology environments.
Once our design and testing is complete we will be announcing services in this area. If you would like to discuss DDOS, OT security or anything else related to Cyber Security, please contact us at [email protected] or call 020 7517 3900 and our team will be happy to help. Just hope you don’t get Grumpy.
