
The Mirai Botnet Architects Are Now Fighting Crime with the FBI - kposehn
https://www.wired.com/story/mirai-botnet-creators-fbi-sentencing/
======
legohead
> Earlier this year, the Mirai defendants worked with FBI agents in Alaska to
> counter a new evolution of DDoS, known as Memcache

what the heck?

> The Mirai court documents outline how Dalton, Jha, and White jumped into
> action in March as the attacks propagated online, working alongside the FBI
> and the security industry to identify vulnerable servers.

As in, scan every IP for port 11211?

~~~
DiabloD3
And scanning every IP for a port is how you trigger automatic abuse reports to
whoever owns the IP block, and failure to respond to said abuse reports (and,
more importantly, ceasing said abusive behavior) leads to eventually the
attacker (the aforementioned government office) having their Internet service
ended due to ToS violations.

Not only that, I suspect some ISPs now run 11211 honeypots to capture networks
that source such attacks, so eventually the FBI would end up in common RBLs
due to their abusive behavior.

In short, I suspect this entire article is bullshit. It _is_ on Wired, after
all.

~~~
gjs278
you massively overestimate what any ISP is going to do. it's nothing. they're
not running honey pots, they don't care.

~~~
blitmap
I think I agree. It's better to not be proactive, especially since port
scanning is a natural way to perform diagnostics. I would wait for others tell
me there's a problem, I wouldn't put money toward sniffing out problems as an
ISP.

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bencollier49
And meanwhile the bloke who stopped the WannaCry outbreak is holed up waiting
for a court date..

~~~
meowface
He's being charged for activity completely unrelated to the WannaCry outbreak
and which occurred years before it. He's likely fully legit now, but no one
can alter the past and no one is above the law.

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rhcom2
Something weird to me about the FBI not having good enough technical abilities
that the cooperation of these three had such an effect.

~~~
neonate
Maybe it's more cultural than technical.

------
dumbfounder
Create a botnet that takes down portions of the Internet and you too can put
"Internship at the FBI" on your resume.

~~~
cf141q5325
If you are morally ambiguous enough to become a snitch.

~~~
dumbfounder
I think creating the botnet already put them in that category.

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hellbanner
Anyone have a link to the .txt interview were the Mirai creator claimed they
made their creation to escape "a shitty eastern European country" and their
main customers were "Top 5 Minecraft servers"?

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jondubois
They got caught so they should be thrown in Jail. They probably made a lot of
Bitcoin from operating their botnet.

I hate how the government keeps giving criminals free passes. Being a criminal
has never been more profitable than it is today. Maybe all honest software
devs should consider a career change.

Most ex-hackers are millionaires now. What kind of message is that?

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _Most ex-hackers are millionaires now._

Big ol' [citation needed] on that claim, please.

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savethefuture
How did they link the three of them to creating it?

~~~
meowface
It wasn't that hard. Krebs found their leader before the FBI arrested them
(though he was on the FBI's radar for a while).

[https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/who-is-anna-senpai-
the-m...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/who-is-anna-senpai-the-mirai-
worm-author/)

~~~
lozaning
Krebs is a super impressive guy in my opinion, and him being able to do
something is not where my bar for easy starts. His investigative abilities and
network of sources I think is unrivaled in his domain.

~~~
meowface
Unrivaled among journalists when it comes to cybercrime investigations,
absolutely. He's good at what he does and also has access to a lot of tools
and helpful contributors. But if you follow the steps, which he lays out very
clearly, it's pretty apparent that identifying the perpetrators wasn't rocket
science, and that it probably wasn't very hard for the FBI.

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stevew20
Always knew the FBI was pitching for the other team...

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excalibur
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~~~
dshibarshin
Always wondered how magazines could afford to pay for this?

~~~
secabeen
The auto-renewal. Most people will forget about the renewal, then renew after
a year at full rates.

~~~
jiaweihli
Isn't the easy solution to this to immediately cancel auto renewal right after
subscribing?

