Late last October, millions of people punched in the URLs of their favorite sites only to be greeted with errors stating the sites were down. In the minutes and hours that followed, it became clear that we were in the midst of one of the largest DDoS attacks in history , affecting some of the most popular sites on the web. As the dust settled, Dyn revealed that they were attacked using a Mirai Botnet , a web of millions of connected IoT devices.
This event shone a bright light on an inherent issue with the many “smart” IoT devices that are becoming so commonplace: they often aren’t very secure, and typically because users don’t change the default administrator credentials. In fact, Mirai spreads by looking for this very weakness in connected devices.
