Things like smart thermostats, internet camera devices, internet enabled refrigerators and smart washing machines fall into the IoT category. These devices, while presenting a multitude of functionality for controlling various mundane aspects of everyday life, such as locking your front door and turning off appliances in your home, also offer criminals a new attack platform: your appliances.
Now, attackers are leveraging these new, IP-based devices to launch some of the most torrential network distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that have been recorded in history. Mirai virus source code was released on the regular internet as well as various darknet avenues. The malware was used most recently in an attack on the Brian Krebs website. The attack generated record amounts of traffic that the company Akamai had to remove the Krebs website from its servers as it was too damaging to keep it in place. The malware package is cross-platform as well, and runs on both 32 and 64 bit architectures, allowing for a greater infection platform. It has three main components; a command and control module that phones home and allows for communications, a network scanner that allows for pivoting and the further infection of other IoT devices and an attack module, allowing for the use and abuse of legitimate network traffic once a target is defined by the command module.