How 3 Teens Built the Mirai Botnet (Part 1 of 6)

October 21st, 2016. Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, and GitHub went down for hours. The malware behind it was called Mirai. It was written by three American teenagers. And the story starts with Minecraft. The leader was Paras Jha, a Rutgers undergrad who came up through Minecraft's DDoS-for-hire underground — a shadow economy where rival game servers paid to knock each other offline for ten or thirty dollars a month. In 2014 he co-founded a DDoS-mitigation company called ProTraf Solutions with Josiah White, then ran the attacks himself: hit a target, then either extort them or pitch ProTraf as the fix. His biggest target was his own university. He kept attacking Rutgers for two years. The Justice Department later confirmed the motive — he wanted Rutgers to drop its existing DDoS provider, Incapsula, and switch to ProTraf. But Jha had bigger plans than Rutgers, which put him on a collision course with the king of the booter scene: VDoS. Sources: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/ddos-on-dyn-impacts-twitter-spotify-reddit/ https://www.wired.com/story/mirai-botnet-minecraft-scam-brought-down-the-internet/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/who-is-anna-senpai-the-mirai-worm-author/ https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/computer-hacker-who-launched-attacks-rutgers-university-ordered-pay-86m-restitution More on cybersecurity, privacy, scams, and homelab on Hake Hardware. New shorts every weekday. #cybersecurity #mirai #botnet