One year ago, the prediction that the “internet of things” would turn malicious on a large scale came true. The Mirai botnet infected millions of IP cameras, routers and digital video recorders. Then came the chaos: distributed denial-of-service attacks that disrupted Amazon, PayPal, Spotify and Twitter (see Mirai Botnet Pummels Internet DNS in Unprecedented Attack).
Mirai sought to take over the easy targets: IoT devices with default or weak authentication credentials. But researchers have found a new IoT botnet that instead exploits security vulnerabilities, a troubling development.
