Maker BrickerBot malware claims to have infected 10 million iot devices

By admin On Dec 12, 2017

Spread the love

The maker of the BrickerBot malware claims that its malicious software has infected approximately 10 million devices. In addition, he says he will stop his ‘clean-up campaign’. The malware renders vulnerable Internet-of-things devices virtually useless.

The person, who refers to himself as The Doctor of The Janitor, announced his decision to quit to Bleeping Computer. The site has previously published an interview with the BrickerBot creator, researching his identity as closely as possible. At the time, the person behind the malware claimed to have infected two million devices. That would mean that eight million devices were added in eight months.

The malware maker cites several reasons for its decision to stop. For example, his actions would contribute to making the ‘iot security disaster’ less serious. He goes on to say that he took action to give everyone time to take action, but in his view not enough is being done to improve the security of Iot devices. Moreover, governments could more easily discover his identity if he continues with his actions.

In his own words, the person behind BrickerBot has been working on his action since November of last year. His malware was noticed by security companies, among others, and thus also by the American Cert. For example, in April, the security company Radware published an analysis of the malware, which showed that it rendered infected systems virtually unusable by damaging the file system and reducing the number of kernel threads to 1.

The maker of BrickerBot sees his activity as a kind of ‘clean-up’ to remove vulnerable IoT devices from the internet. That does not alter the fact that his actions are illegal and there are ethical concerns. There are also other similar malware variants. For example, the Hajime malware, which is intended to inhibit the expansion of the Mirai botnet. That botnet consists of vulnerable IoT devices such as IP cameras and digital video recorders and is capable of carrying out large DDOs attacks.