Cyber threats seem to be increasing exponentially in 2018, especially when we see new malware variants constantly. This is because source codes for various malware continue to circulate online. Mirai variants are among the most dangerous, with the most recent one, Mirai Okiru, being the highlight.
Researchers have identified a new variant of the notorious Mirai malware designed to infect poorly secured IoT devices running on ARC processors. So far, Mirai and its variants have targeted well-known CPU architectures such as x86, ARM, Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC, and Motorola 6800 – found in millions of devices.
Mirai Okiru, as it was called, was first spotted by user @unixfreaxjp of the “MalwareMustDie” group and shared on Twitter by independent researcher Odisseus. It is a new piece of ELF malware that targets devices with ARC cores and the Linux operating system. This is the second most popular CPU core in the world, found in more than 2 billion products annually, including cameras, mobile phones, telephones, TVs, flash drives, cars and IoT devices. However, this is not the first variant of the Mirai botnet based on Linux ELF malware. Mirai also has another version, which was designed to target devices that have MIPS and ARM processors. It should also be noted that Okiru is very different from Satori despite the fact that they have quite similar characteristics.
Since Mirai Okiru was designed to target millions of ARC devices, the DDoS attack expected to be created by the Okiru botnet will likely be the largest ever. The new arrival of ARC-based IoT devices will exponentially increase the number of unsecured devices, allowing hackers to gain control over most of them.
We remind you that the largest DDoS Attack (1TBps) was carried out by just 152,000 infected IoT devices using the Mirai bot.
