Notes

Minecraft Link To Net's Biggest Botnet

Minecraft link to the world's largest botnet



Malware that led to the internet's biggest ever cyber-attack in the year 2000 included links to Minecraft servers as per the experts who were investigating it.



Security blogger Brian Krebs has spent months investigating the attack which knocked his blog down.



He claims that the roots of the Mirai botnet can be traced back to rivalries within the Minecraft community.



His claims are confirmed by an expert in security who has provided net security for Minecraft servers.



Robert Coelho, vice president of security firm ProxyPipe Robert Coelho, vice president of security firm ProxyPipe, told BBC that his suspicions about who was behind the Mirai code have been referred to the FBI who are "actively looking into" the claims.



Mirai is a botnet that includes more than 500,000 connected devices, such as routers and webcams was invented.



The attacks it unleashed - so-called denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that hit web pages with so much data that they collapsed - were the biggest web had ever seen.



Reddit, Spotify, and Twitter were among the victims.



"Hundreds of hours"



After the attacks, the person responsible - using the codename Anna Senpai - published the source code online, which paved the way for copycat attacks.



A modified version of the malware was later used to attack UK internet service providers TalkTalk and the Post Office.



Since being struck by the Mirai botnet in September 2016 Krebs has been adamant that Krebs has devoted "hundreds of hours" to identifying the person behind it.
Minecraft


He wrote "If you have ever wondered why there aren't more internet criminals are being brought to justice, then I can tell that the sheer quantity and perseverance required to piece together who's doing what (and the reasons) online is enormous."



His research led him directly to the community around Minecraft the computer game that is now owned by Microsoft, in which users create things using cubic blocks.



It has a massive following, especially among children, and it is estimated that at any one moment, a million people are playing it.



Mr Krebs claims that a Minecraft server with over 1,000 players could earn $50,000 per month (PS40,600). This is due to the fact that players renting space to build their own Minecraft worlds.



"The first clues to Anna Senpai's identity didn't become evident until I realized that Mirai was just the most recent incarnation of an IoT [internet of thingsbotnet family that has been in development and relatively broad use for nearly three years," he writes.



The code in these earlier versions was frequently used to hack into web servers that host Minecraft, he claims.



ProxyPipe owned by Mr. Coelho has a large number of Minecraft servers as clients. It in mid-2015 was struck by a massive cyberattack, launched from a botnet comprised of IoT devices such as web cameras.



BBC interviewer Mr Coelho stated that he was sceptical about the attacker, and added that "Minecraft is a community that is tight-knit." We know who is talking to whom."



He claimed that the attack was carried out by a security firm that was a competitor that also provided DDoS protection to Minecraft clients.



He claimed that the founder and client of the security firm had previously managed a Minecraft web server.



He claims that Anna Senpai, the Mirai author approached him via Skype at September's end to explain that the attack on his company was "not personal" and to brag about how he was paid by the owners of a massive Minecraft server to launch an attack against a rival server.



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Read More: https://coopwb.org/