Minecraft Link To Nets Biggest Botnet

Minecraft link to the largest botnet

20 January 2017

Malware that led to the internet's largest cyber-attack ever included links to Minecraft servers as per the experts who were investigating it. games

Brian Krebs, security blogger, spent months investigating the attack that took his blog offline.

He claims that the roots for the Mirai botnet can been traced back to rivalries within the Minecraft community.

His claims are confirmed by an expert in security who has provided security on the net for Minecraft servers.

Robert Coelho (Vice President of Security ProxyPipe) Robert Coelho (Vice President of Security ProxyPipe) told the BBC that his suspicions regarding the Mirai code were passed to the FBI who are "actively investigating" them.

The botnet Mirai was made up of more than 500,000 web-connected devices like routers and cameras.

The attacks it launched known as denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that hit web pages with so much data that they collapsed - were the biggest the internet had ever faced.

The victims that were taken offline included Twitter, Spotify and Reddit.

"Hundreds of hours"

Shortly after the attacks, the person claiming responsibility - using the codename Anna Senpai published the source code online, opening the way for copycat attacks.

A modified version of the malware was later used to attack UK internet service providers TalkTalk and the Post Office.

Krebs spent "hundreds of hour" investigating the Mirai botnet attack in September 2016.

He wrote "If you have ever wondered why so few internet criminals are being brought to justice I can tell you that the sheer volume and determination required to piece together who's doing what (and why) online is enormous."

His research led him to the community around Minecraft, a computer game now owned by Microsoft where players create their own things using cubic blocks.

It has a massive following, especially among children, and it is estimated that at any one moment, a million people are playing it.

According to Mr Krebs the large and successful Minecraft web server with more than 1,000 users per day logging on can earn up to $50,000 (PS40,600) per month, mainly from gamers renting space to create their Minecraft worlds.

He writes that Anna Senpai's name was not revealed until he was able to understand Mirai the most recent member of an IoT botnet family that had been in development for nearly three years. games

The code in the earlier versions was commonly used to hack into servers that hosted Minecraft, he claims.

ProxyPipe, owned by Mr Coelho, had many Minecraft servers as clients. In the middle of 2015, ProxyPipe was hit by an attack of massive proportions that came from a botnet of IoT devices such as web cameras.

BBC interviewer Mr Coelho stated that he was suspicious about the attacker and said that "Minecraft is a tight-knit community." We know who is talking to who."

He claimed that the attack was a result of a security firm that was competing, that also provided DDoS protection to Minecraft customers.

He claimed that the client and founder of the security firm had previously managed a Minecraft web server.

He claims that Anna Senpai, the Mirai author, contacted him on Skype at the end of September to explain that the attack on his company was "not personal", but also to boast about how he was compensated by the owners a large Minecraft server to launch an assault on a rival server.

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