KrebsOnSecurity is a frequent target of hackers and has now been targeted by a powerful botnet. The website, run by security expert Brian Krebs, was attacked by the “Meris” botnet on Thursday night.
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Meris is a new botnet powered by Internet of Things (IoT) devices. IoT products, computers, and home appliances – including cameras, video recorders, televisions, and routers – that are hijacked become “slave nodes” in a botnet’s network and can then be used to conduct denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
In this case, Meris consists of a huge number of MikroTik routers. According to Qrator Labs and Yandex, Meris first appeared in late June and is still “growing.”.
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Meris reminds us a lot of Mirai, a botnet famous for taking down large parts of the internet in 2016, but the team says that may not be the right comparison at this time.
Mirai's source code was later leaked, giving rise to several variants that are still operational.
Krebs says the DDoS attack was larger than the one launched against KrebsOnSecurity in 2016 by a Mirai operator.
The security expert says the volume of traffic launched by the botnet was more than “four times” that of Mirai, reaching over two million requests per second.
The domain is now protected under Google's Project Shield.
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Meris is also suspected of being behind two other major attacks this year, the one against Yandex last week and a major attack against Cloudflare in July, with 17.2 million requests per second.
Information source: zdnet.com
