Mirai Botnet Creators To Help Law Enforcement Agencies On Cybercrime Investigations

The three hackers who controlled the notorious Mirai botnet was sentenced last year in a conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act.

Mirai is malware which turns computer systems running Linux into remotely controlled “bots”, that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks.

Mirai Botnet Creators

The Mirai botnet was used in some of the largest and most disruptive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Paras Jha, 21, Josiah White, 20, Dalton Norman, 21, are the Mirai Botnet Creators who pleaded guilty in District Court of Alaska for Computer fraud and abuse act.

The Mirai botnet targeted IoT devices including wireless cameras, routers, and digital video recorders, the Mirai operators gain control over the devices by exploiting disclosed and non-disclosed vulnerabilities to gain control over the devices and to add them in botnet network.

After cooperating extensively with FBI, Jha, White, and Norman were each sentenced to serve a minimum period of five-year probation and continue to cooperate with the FBI on cybercrime and cybersecurity matters.

The prosecutors ordered the three hackers to pay $127,000, 2,500 hours of community service and voluntarily hand over cryptocurrency seized during the course of the investigation.

The operators of Mirai botnet conducted a number of powerful DDoS attacks, for instance, the attack on a college in the U.S lasted for 54 hours, around 2.8 Billion Requests sent.

From December 2016 to February 2017, the defendants successfully infected over 100,000 primarily U.S.-based computing devices, such as home Internet routers, with malicious software.

“The perpetrators count on being technologically one step ahead of law enforcement officials. The plea agreement with the young offenders, in this case, was a unique opportunity for law enforcement officers, and will give FBI investigators the knowledge and tools they need to stay ahead of cybercriminals around the world,” said U.S. Attorney Bryan Schroder.

“The sentences announced today would not have been possible without the cooperation of our partners in international law enforcement and the private sector,” said Special Agent in Charge of FBI’s Anchorage Field Office, Jeffery Peterson.

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