BotNet News

A botnet is a group of compromised devices—computers, smartphones, IoT devices, or routers—infected with malware and controlled by the attacker. The attacker, known as a “bot-herder,” can send commands to the entire network of bots at once to perform attacks or other malevolent activities, such as DDoS attack generation, spam distribution, credential stuffing, and cryptojacking.

A device becomes a bot when it downloads malware from an unsafe app or insecure website, connects to attacker-controlled infrastructure, and begins acting on its own. Many bots spread through networks by scanning for devices with default credentials and vulnerable configurations, like exposed management interfaces or outdated firmware. The Mirai botnet, for example, infected thousands of IoT devices that were then used to launch massive DDoS attacks.

Bots often communicate with each other using encrypted methods, constantly changing C&C servers, peer-to-peer communication, or by distributing traffic across thousands of IP addresses to evade rate-limiting measures. This means it’s hard for security teams to detect these activities on their own. However, a combination of signals—such as the use of Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA) or rapid flux behavior—can help spot this activity in network traffic and other security monitoring tools.

Botnets are one of the most powerful weapons in hackers’ arsenal. They can provide processing power and anonymity that’s not available from a single computer, and they allow attackers to launch attacks on a scale much greater than what they could accomplish alone. Several recent law-enforcement and security-industry operations have disrupted large botnets, such as Aisuru, KimWolf, JackSkid, and Mossad, which reportedly compromised more than three million IoT devices in DDoS attacks that reached 30 Tbps.