Minecraft Link To Nets Biggest Botnet

Minecraft link to the world's 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.

Brian Krebs, security blogger, spent months investigating the attack that knocked his blog offline. Just Premium E

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

His claims are backed up by an expert in security who has offered net security to Minecraft servers.

Robert Coelho, vice president of security firm ProxyPipe, told the BBC that his suspicions regarding who was behind the Mirai code were passed to the FBI which is "actively looking into" the claims.

The botnet Mirai consisted of more than 500,000 connected to the internet devices such as routers and cameras.

The attacks it launched known as denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that hit websites with such a large amount of data they fall over was the largest that the internet had ever faced.

The victims who were shut down included Twitter, Spotify and Reddit.

"Hundreds of hours"

After the attacks, the individual who claimed responsibility - using the codename Anna Senpai published the source code online, which paved the way for copies of the 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.

"If you've ever wondered why it seems that so few internet criminals are brought to justice, I can tell you that the amount of determination and investigative resources required to figure out who's been responsible for what (and why) in the online era is staggering," he wrote.

His research led him to Minecraft the computer program currently owned by Microsoft that lets users create things with cubic blocks.

It is loved by many, particularly children, and is played by more than one million people at any given moment.

Mr Krebs claims that a Minecraft server with more than 1,000 users can earn $50,000 per month (PS40,600). This is due to the fact that players renting space to build their Minecraft worlds.

"The first clues to Anna Senpai's identity were not clear until I understood that Mirai was the newest version of an IoT [internet of things] botnet family that has been in development and in widely used for three years," he writes.

The code used in the earlier versions was commonly used to knock over web servers that host Minecraft, he claims. Premium e

ProxyPipe is owned by Mr. Coelho - had plenty of Minecraft servers as clients. The server in mid-2015 was hit by a massive attack that was launched by a botnet comprised of IoT devices, such as web cameras.

Mr. Coelho stated to the BBC that he was able to confirm his suspicions as to who was responsible for the attack: "Minecraft is a tight knit community. We know who is talking to who."

He claimed that the attack was perpetrated by a security firm that was a competitor, which also provided DDoS protection to Minecraft clients.

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

He claims that Anna Senpai, the Mirai creator, contacted him via Skype at September's end to explain that the attack on his company was "not personal" and to boast about how he had been paid by the owners of a huge Minecraft server to launch an assault on an opponent server.

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