US takes down ‘cybercrime-as-a-service’ botnets that hijacked over 3 million IoT devices globally

US Justice Department has announced that it dismantled four massive botnets responsible forsome of the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in history. The Justice department says that the four botnets targeted in the operation together infected millions of devices worldwide with majority of them being Internet of Things (IoT) devices like digital video recorders, web cameras, or WiFi routers

“The four botnets launched Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks targeting victims around the world. Some of these attacks measured approximately 30 Terabits per second, which were record-breaking attacks." the Justice department said in a statement

The operators of these botnets then sold access to the infected devices to cybercriminals. The victims devices were then forced to paricipate in thousands of DDoS attacks that targeted computers and servers around the world.

The DoJ says as of March, the number of infected infected devices hijacked worldwide by these botnet administrators exceeded 3 million.

“Some victims reported the DDoS attacks resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in losses and remediation expenses. Cybercriminals used these botnets to launch hundreds of thousands of attacks, in some cases demanding extortion payments from victims.” DoJ said

Court documents revealed the volume of DDoS attack commands issued by the four botnets. Aisuru botnet issued over 2,00,000 commands while KimWolf issued more than 25,000 attack commands, JackSkid launched more than 90,000 DDoS commands and Mossad launched more than 1,000 commands.

As per a Wired report all four boytets are a variant of the infamous Mirai botnet which first emerged in 2016 and famously took down major portions of the US internet by attacking the domain-name provider Dyn.

Reportedly one of the four botnets involved in the attack, Aisuru had gained the most notoriety due to record-breaking or near-record cyberattacks it carried out last fall. The botnet was offered as a ‘booter’ service that offered brute-force disruptibe capabilties to anyone willing to pay. It had also been used against gaming service Minecraft and independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs.

US says its operation ran simultaneously with the law enforcement actions in Canada and germany which specifically targeted the individuals operating the botnets.