Mirai Based Botnet “OMG” Turns IoT Device into a Proxy Server

A new Variant called “OMG” currently evolving to abuse the IoT Devices and turns it into a Proxy server by adding new techniques that will be later used for various Malicious activities.

Deep observation reveals that it mainly used to earn more money by compromising many IoT Devices.

one of the main way to earn money using proxies by selling the access to hackers to do internet crimes behind the strong anonymous place.

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Past few related scenario with same modification used to compromise the IoT devices to Mining Cryptocurrency.

In this case, using IoT devices and turn it into a Proxy server to maintain the anonymity for various kind of cybercrimes.

Here the use of Mirai Botnet is added a lot of value to these cybercrime operations and many similarities are identified with Mirai Botnet.

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How Does IoT Turn into Proxy Server using Mirai Bot

Researchers analysis the configuration table of the OMG and reveal that, OMG table of completely encrypted and using 0xdeadbeef as cipher key seed, decryption can be possible and this was the same method used by Mirai.

According to Fortinet, The first thing we noticed are the strings /bin/busybox OOMGA and OOMGA: applet not found.

The name Mirai was given to the Mirai bot because of the strings /bin/busybox MIRAI and MIRAI: applet not found, which are commands to determine if it has successfully brute-forced its way into the targeted IoT device.

This OMG variant regularly adds and removes the configurations that were originally used with the Mirai Bot.

OMG using some aditional strings as well that will help to apply firewall rule to allow traffic on two random ports.

Mirai’s attack modules such as killer and scanner are always kept with it which indicates that OMG also does the operations what Mirai already did.

kill processes – related to telnet, ssh, HTTP by checking open ports and telnet brute-force login to spread, and DOS attack.

Once the module successfully initialized, OMG connected to itS Command and control server and resolves to 188.138.125.235.

Later analyst’s received a 5-byte long data string from the server, with the first byte being the command on how the IoT device will be used.

In this case, 0 to be used as a proxy server and  1 for an attack, and >1 to terminate the connection.

Also, OMG using the same proxy server called 3proxy that was used by Mirai and firewall rule must be added to allow traffic on the generated ports to work proxy properly.

As the server was not alive during analysis, we are assuming that the author sells access to the IoT proxy server, providing them access credentials. Fortinet said.