“Hide ‘N Seek” the First IoT Botnet with the Ability to Survive Device Reboots

A new version of Hide and Seek botnet detected by Bitdefender researchers with plenty of improvements on the propagation side. The botnet has a history of infection close to 90,000  unique devices from the device it was detected.

The new version of the botnet is the world’s first one to communicate through custom-built peer to peer protocol and the first bot with the ability to survive a reboot.

With the new version, it includes additional binaries to leverage new vulnerabilities to
compromise more IPTV camera models, in addition to that, it also detects two new devices and their default credentials.

Bitdefender researchers discovered the new version of Hide and Seek botnet targets generic devices and scans for the telnet service. If the service is found then it attempts a brute force.

If the login Succeeds it locks down the access of port 23 to prevent the device being it hijacked by competing botnet.

It attacks a wide range of devices and architectures, researchers said “the bot has 10
different binaries compiled for various platforms including x86, x64, ARM (Little Endian and Big Endian), SuperH, PPC and so on”.

Also Read HNS IoT Botnet Compromised More than 14k Devices that Spreads from Asia to the United States

In order to achieve its persistence, the malware copies itself into /etc/init.d/ and adds itself to start with the operating system. Also, it opens a random UDP port which allows attackers to establish communication with the device.

According to researchers the botnet still has no support for the DDoS attack, according to their analysis “the botnet is in the growth phase and attackers trying to seize as many devices as possible”. Attackers can expand the function of the botnet at any time.

As with any new technology, IoT promises to be the future of the Internet, bringing better connectivity and ease of use of the devices we use, but these botnet attacks show, an equal amount of stress must be placed on security.