Another Massive Cyber Attack Takes an Entire Country Offline

Cyber criminals are now using Mirai malware to accept down the entire internet infrastructure of Republic of liberia. The African nation was targeted past the same cyber weapon that caused the largest ever cyber attack of the history, simply two weeks agone.

Mirai malware was used in October to launch a massive distributed deprival-of-service (DDoS) attack that afflicted some of the earth's biggest online sites and services. The attack was launched using a growing network of infected internet-continued devices that sent 1.1Tbps traffic.

The source code was publicly released past a cybercriminal earlier in October, causing the E Coast cyber attack. Mirai malware is designed to scan for insecure IoT devices, using them to send massive amounts of traffic, causing service disruption.

Security experts had warned that the Oct DDoS attack was just a offset of an expected onslaught of upcoming cyber attacks - of even larger scale. They believe that hereafter DDoS attacks could reach to 10 Tbps traffic, plenty to take downwardly the net infrastructure of an entire country.

Is cyber attack on Republic of liberia a test case?

Using this malware, someone is now trying to take down cyberspace access of an entire country by launching massive DDoS attacks. Criminals have been using the aforementioned weapon over the past 7 days in the continued attacks on Liberia, 500 Gbps in size. Not as big equally the Oct cyber attack, but still among the largest.

Another Mirai botnet, known equally Botnet xiv, began intermittent attacks on the two Liberian companies that co-ain the only fiber cable coming into the state, sending it virtually entirely offline with each attack.

"Transit providers, confirm over 500gbit/Sec of traffic is output during attacks. Attacks last a short period. It is the largest of the Mirai botnets and the domain controlling it pre-dates the attacks on Dyn," security expert Kevin Beaumont said.

"The capacity makes it one of the biggest DDoS botnets ever seen. Given the volume of traffic, it appears to exist the owned by the actor which attacked Dyn."

Many are asking why attack Liberia? A small nation, just 6 percentage of the country has net connectivity. But a single fiber cyberspace cable off the west African coast provides internet to the country. Security researchers speculate that attacking niggling-known countries seem to exist the best place to test cyber weapons. Beaumont too believes that the attacks "appear to exist [of] a exam nature."

If a test botnet tin take an entire country offline, we can only assume what a full-fledged cyber attack will practise. As they keep warning, it's only the start of a chilling and a nasty new era of internet.