[HN Gopher] KrebsOnSecurity Hit by Huge New IoT Botnet "Meris"
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KrebsOnSecurity Hit by Huge New IoT Botnet "Meris"
Author : DemiGuru
Score : 34 points
Date : 2021-09-10 18:19 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (krebsonsecurity.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (krebsonsecurity.com)
| somehnguy wrote:
| Well, this is concerning. I just bought a MicroTik RB4011 to
| replace my ol faithful Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X because I'm getting
| fiber installed next week...
|
| I guess I will be doing some research on MicroTik vulnerabilities
| and try to find out if these are just misconfigured devices that
| got owned or if I should hold off on the switch!
| outworlder wrote:
| You may be interested in this thread:
| https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=178417
|
| Edit: also this checker, when you get the device online:
| https://radar.qrator.net/
|
| Unclear how old your firmware is, but it seems that the
| vulnerability was patched years ago. Check anyway.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I don't see how you'd be owned if you're denying all outside
| traffic, but stranger things have happened.
|
| They don't all come with it configured this way by default, and
| it's definitely something to be aware of.
|
| The hAP AC^2, for example, has a button that rotates through 3
| default configs. One of those configs is NAT home
| router/firewall, one of them is just router, and one of them is
| completely empty. At least, that's how I remember it working.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| The internet needs to figure out how to make appliance
| manufacturers liable for security breaches in some way. Otherwise
| the cost of security is an externality that they dump onto the
| internet for free.
| DemiGuru wrote:
| If "Bad bot" traffic now accounts for a quarter of all internet
| traffic. Increasing by 6.2 percent from the previous year, bad
| bot traffic now represents no less than a quarter of all internet
| traffic. At this rate where is the Internet headed? Are we
| destined to contend with a slowdown in overall network
| performance as result? (https://www.imperva.com/blog/bad-bot-
| report-2021-the-pandemi...)
| Guest42 wrote:
| To me it's rather concerning that more and more products are
| opting towards connecting to the internet for seemingly little
| reason. The costs of security on that seem somewhat
| astronomical.
| soco wrote:
| Soon your dishwasher will do some blockchain too, because
| product management is so keen to ride on every fashion
| wave...
| tendencydriven wrote:
| Reminds me a lot of "Unauthorized Bread"[0] by Cory Doctorow,
| worth a read (or listen).
|
| [0] https://craphound.com/category/unauthorizedbread/
| kryogen1c wrote:
| this reminds me of the books by daniel suarez daemon and its
| sequel freedom. the internet is taken over by an AI of sorts
| and one of the first orders of business is to clear out
| negative value adds like this:
|
| DEATH TO SPAMMERS
|
| if i was to pick two books to recommend to all HN, it would be
| those. ive read everything suarez has written and theyre all
| greaf, but the technopolitical daemon and freedom and
| superlative.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| The Maelstrom, a la Peter Watts?
| aasasd wrote:
| What's the purpose of attacks like these three? Just the
| advertisement that someone has a nice beefy fleet for rent?
| taxcoder wrote:
| As a comment on the Krebs article suggests, some see him as an
| enemy due to his work.
| aasasd wrote:
| Still not seeing what a DoS attack on him achieves. What, he
| loses some kind of sweet profits due to the site being down
| for a day, if Google can't shield it for some reason?
|
| And the other two obviously aren't going to keel over unless
| you come up with like five of such botnets. They're pretty
| much the largest possible targets who are still gonna report
| that they felt something. Which sounds precisely like
| advertisement to me.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I would naively expect a security researcher to take a bit
| of a reputation hit if an attack actually managed to take
| his site down.
| ketzo wrote:
| And a reputation boost for the hackers that managed to
| pull it off.
| aasasd wrote:
| I wouldn't expect that at all, since the attack doesn't
| have any security implications other than 'someone found
| how to send a lot of requests from routers', and the
| target is just one guy with a blog--not a corporation
| whose _job_ is to serve web requests.
| noAnswer wrote:
| If nothing else, it is a "show of force".
| deepsun wrote:
| I believe it became like a game "Flip Krebs". His website
| became the test-bed for botnets, so see them used in the wild
| soon.
| mypoormother wrote:
| Mr. Krebs raped my mother behind the dumpster of an Applebee's in
| 1992. He is my father.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| He has a very special way with the - as he calls them -
| miscreants. He engages in rather diplomatic chats, like in a
| fascinated way. His website is of course target practice for many
| people, I am sure he is not impressed, he has his own fake
| swatting protocol with the police, the people had his home
| swatted many times.
| ogurechny wrote:
| Are routers "IoT devices" now? This looks like a deliberate
| journalistic buzzword stuffing, given that the author cites the
| botnet description extensively.
| SixDouble5321 wrote:
| The article does mention the Mirai botnet which is made up of
| light bulbs and DVRs and such.
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| IoT has always been a buzzword, but at least it communicates
| what it is slightly better than embedded system. The buzzword I
| currently despise is edge computing.
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(page generated 2021-09-10 23:01 UTC)