The ease of taking control of a cheap IoT device makes them the perfect target to craft a botnet to perform DDoS attacks.
I heard about botnets created from a lot of hacked IoT devices used to create DDoS attacks on websites.
How much of this information is true? Is there an existing common threat about IoT botnets nowadays? Which were the most popular IoT botnets and attacks?
The truth is that IoT is a new trend, a new surface with a lot of possibilities, and one of the most popular IoT botnets is Mirai, here is a brief description of it:
Mirai (Japanese for "the future", 未来) is a malware that turns networked devices running Linux into remotely controlled "bots" that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks. It primarily targets online consumer devices such as IP cameras and home routers. The Mirai botnet was first found in August 2016 by MalwareMustDie, a whitehat malware research group, and has been used in some of the largest and most disruptive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, including an attack on 20 September 2016 on computer security journalist Brian Krebs's web site, an attack on French web host OVH, and the October 2016 Dyn cyberattack. According to a leaked chat log between Anna-senpai and Robert Coelho, Mirai was named after the 2011 TV anime series Mirai Nikki.
If you want to check the source code, here it is. Also you can check this report from Arbor Networks about IoT DDoS Attacks for further information.
Hope it helps.
Popular IoT botnets and attacks:
Reference: Radware Blog
