Learning about Mirai, its clones, and more

For many years, the Windows platform was the main target of attackers because it was the most common desktop OS. This means that many beginner malware developers had it at home to experiment with, and many organizations used it on the desktops of non-IT personnel, for example, accountants that had access to financial transactions, or maybe diplomats that had access to some high-profile confidential information.

As far as this is concerned, the Mirai (meaning future in Japanese) malware fully deserved its notoriety, as it opened a door to a new, previously largely unexplored area for malware – the IoT. While it wasn’t the first malware to leverage it (other botnets, such as Qbot, were known a long time before), the scale of its activity clearly showed everybody how hardcoded credentials such as root/123456 on largely ignored smart devices could now represent a really serious threat when thousands of compromised appliances suddenly...