Malicious Android Botnet Called “WireX” Disrupted a DDoS Attack Against Content Delivery Networks

A Dubbed Android Bonet Called “WireX” Create a DDoS Attack using Android devices that running malicious applications which is designed to create DDoS traffic.

WireX Specifically Targeting Content  Delivery Network such as WordPress and many CDN’s were infected by This Significant DDoS Attack by botnet dubbed WireX. This incident Reported on August 17th, 2017.

WireX name taken from one of the delimiter strings in its command and control Sever. Researchers from Akamai, CloudFlare, Flashpoint, Google, Oracle Dyn, RiskIQ, Team Cymru, and other organizations cooperated to combat this botnet.

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How Does WireX Botnet Create a DDoS

Initially, This Botnet was Undetected since it attack performs Minor infection and later Researcher searching the  26 characters User-Agent string in logs.

Later it was Discovered with the Primary Attack on August 15th from a minimum of 70,000 concurrent IP addresses.

Botnet based on the count of unique IPs per hour 

Primary Attack node HTTP GET was used to Generate a Traffic and WireX is a volumetric DDoS attack at the application layer.

According to CloudFlare majority of the traffic from this botnet was distinguished by the use of an HTTP Request’s User-Agent string containing the lowercase English alphabet characters, in random order.

Revealed information says, Botnets participated more than 100 countries and Researchers Believe that Much Other Organization also experience similar attacks.

“Once the larger collaborative effort began, the investigation began to unfold rapidly starting with the investigation of historic log information, which revealed a connection between the attacking IPs and something malicious, possibly running on top of the Android operating system.”

Botnet Capabilities contained Android Applications belongs to media/video players, ringtones or tools such as storage managers.

Once Application launch into the users Mobile, it begins the work by communicating their work by starting the command and control server using an attack command.

Antivirus scanners currently recognize this malware as the “Android Clicker” trojan, but this campaign’s purpose has nothing to do with click fraud. but it was used to create a DDoS Attack.

Google Said, We identified approximately 300 apps associated with the issue, blocked them from the Play Store, and we’re in the process of removing them from all affected devices.

The researchers’ findings, combined with our own analysis, have enabled us to better protect Android users, everywhere.