Suspect Arrested In Connection With Mirai Botnet

A 29-year-old man was arrested by British police at a London airport on Wednesday in connection with the November 2016 hack of about one million Deutsche Telekom’s customers, reports DataBreachToday. The arrest was made on behalf of Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany and unconfirmed reports say it could be in relation to Mirai botnet attacks.

Mirai malware, security experts explain, target default accounts and passwords and may be behind the attack on routers of the German telecom company customers. Mirai was originally controlled by a group called Poodlecorp but is perhaps now used by several hackers and believed to be behind some major distributed denial-of-service attacks recently.

"One person writes the Mirai botnet and then publishes its code, and then within a week it's in dozens of botnets," explained security expert Bruce Schneier at last week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco.

Exposure to such malware, say other experts, is because of unsecure IoT devices that get exploited to launch the DDoS attacks. The solution, they add, is to discard such devices or disallow them to be connected to the public Internet.

Read more details here.