Hackers Battle For 3 Million Strong Mirai Botnet
Author: Brian Karas, Published on Nov 28, 2016
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Comments (11)
Sean Patton
This is a really interesting article, great job. My question in follow up to this article, is there even much that can be done to prevent this type of stuff from happening? The cat has been out of the bag for so long, and there so many criminal and militaristic (irony?) opportunities for these networks, that I see no fix to these types of bot/zombie nets. You can try to avoid buying products that can be cracked, but theres new vulnerabilities every week, its a losing proposition.
From a network security standpoint there are Firewalls from PaloAlto/Cisco/Fortinet/Baracuda/etc that can detect and deny DDOS traffic attacks, prevent your botnet infected devices from communicating out, but those tools on high enough throughput hardware can run in the multithousands of dollars price range.
As you mention, strong passwords could be a huge fix to a large chuck of these botnets, but we all know that's a lost effort. Unless you can overhaul the entire alphanumeric password string paradigm (you cant).
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Brian Karas
I think there are a few things that are easy and help reduce the problem:
Manufacturers could make a huge leap in reducing device exploitability if they were willing to make it a priority, and willing to invest proper effort into building more robust devices, by adding secure boot capabilities.
Some SoC suppliers, such as Ambarella, have been adding secure boot functionality into their chips, but it does not appear that security manufacturers are doing anything with it.
In short, secure boot can be utilized to ensure that even if an attacker could gain access to a root shell, they could not load/run unauthorized code.
Secure boot would make it several orders of magnitude more difficult to create botnet's, as the hackers could not just download software to make the camera/recorder do whatever they want. This is roughly similar in concept to how an iPhone cannot run software that has not been officially vetted by Apple, meaning that manufacturers like Axis would not have to give up the ability to run 3rd party apps on their cameras.
Like most things, creating software that is more secure and goes through additional authentication processes would take more effort on the manufacturers or developers part, but the result would be significantly increased security, and trustability, of recorders and cameras. But, the manufacturers are only likely to add this in if there is financial benefit to doing so, either by customers requesting it, or the support headaches of hacked devices becoming significant.
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Undisclosed #1
Yes, couldn't agree more: Simple Solution To Default Password Conundrum...
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Undisclosed Distributor #2
The problem that will continue to exist is that there are hundreds of thousands of these cameras that are already out there and that will not be updated due to ignorance of the problem, not wanting to revisit old installations, or just not caring. For most products sold in the last year or so, the vulnerability was addressed by closing the telnet ports to deter infection of the devices. This botnet will continue to function due to the old cameras that will not be updated, not due to new cameras being purchased today or even within the past several months.
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Undisclosed #3
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Undisclosed End User #4
Very informative which I was not aware of.
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