Investigating Mirai

The use of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to knock services, applications or businesses offline isn’t a new strategy. In fact, DDoS attacks are in such widespread use that it’s practically a household term.

And while the number of attacks is growing, the more concerning trends are the raw scale and how DDoS attacks are being leveraged in more creative manners against victims. The second half of 2016 saw new records for DDoS size, easily pushing past 600 Gbps thresholds.

How have DDoS attacks evolved so quickly to surpass countermeasures that, until today, have been largely successful in detecting and mitigating these threats?

It starts with Mirai. It’s a new and clever malware that takes advantage of lax security standards in connected smart devices – also known as the Internet of Things (IoT) – to build massive botnets that are able to deploy DDoS payloads that surpass 1 Tbps throughputs.