CDN (Content Delivery Network) Cloudflare last week announced that it has detected and mitigated the “largest Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in history”. The malicious campaign, which targeted an unnamed financial institution, took place in July.
According to the company, the perpetrators of the DDoS attack sent 17.2 million requests per second to the organization’s server in order to consume all its processing and make the service unavailable. This number represents three times the number of requests from the previous record.
All this traffic came from a network of 20,000 devices infected with the Mirai malware. The malicious program is known to break into IoT devices running Linux, such as routers, smart lamps, and security cameras, taking advantage of the use of factory passwords not changed by the owners.
Rede Mirai commanded the attack which was prevented by the company.Source: Cloudflare / disclosure
Also according to Cloudflare, the analysis of the IPs that sent the requests to the server indicated the use of infected devices in 125 countries by the Mirai botnet. Brazil appears in third place in the ranking, with 7% of gadgets affected by malware, behind India (10%) and Indonesia (15%).
Influence on connected devices
Many people tend not to change the default login credentials of routers, cameras, and other devices, making it easier for malicious files to invade. Once infected, devices receive remote commands to attack targets defined by cyber criminals.
Blocking Mirai-type bots from accessing internet-connected devices is one way to mitigate malicious campaigns like this one that resulted in the largest DDoS attack in history. To do this, the recommendation is to change the username and password of the device.
The network security firm also said volumetric attacks tend to be short-lived and difficult to detect, requiring more attention from organizations.