Now Knocking A Country Offline - The Video Surveillance Driven Botnet Wreaks Havok

The video surveillance driven botnet is now attacking an entire country.

The Mirai malware that took advantage of poor security in Xiongmai, Dahua and other devices has graduated from attacking reporters to companies and now to countries.

The country of Liberia's Internet was attacked and knocked offline temporarily using Mirai, as first reported by Kevin Beaumont. It is not clear if the goal of the hackers using Mirai is to hurt Liberia or to use this as a test / warm-up for bigger attacks.

Mirai Not Going Away / Bad For Video Surveillance

The net/net here is that this is a clear sign that Mirai is not going away. There are fears, increasingly reasonable, that Mirai could be used to disrupt parts of the Internet during the US election days away. And, even if not that, there is many ways Mirai could cause significant damage and disruption.

And while ultimately the problem is rooted in manufacturers like Xiongmai and Dahua with poor security decisions, the entire reputation of the video surveillance industry is at risk as the public increasingly associates Internet outages with video surveillance devices too cheap or dumb to take basic security precautions.