// Hacking NEWS // A Teenager Created Malware that Destroyed Thousands of Connected Objects
The hacker used lists of Telnet identifiers to connect to insecure devices. Faced with the scale of the situation, he finally stopped his operation.
The world of connected objects may have narrowly avoided another disaster.
A few days ago, a hacker launched Silexbot, a malware that tries to connect to objects connected to the Internet via Telnet protocol.
Like the Mirai worm, it uses a list of common identifiers, such as root/password. An ultra-classic technique.
If the malware succeeds in connecting, Silex then runs other harmful commands that delete network configurations, flush iptables, and add a rule that DROPS all connections, before rebooting the device. A list of the damaging commands it executes to brick the IoT device is available at the end of the article.
The only solution is to reinstall the firmware, which is not always an easy task.
The worm was detected and analyzed by Larry Cashdollar, a security researcher at Akamai. In a blog, he gives the technical details of the attack. He also got his hands on a message left by the hacker in his own code.
In this text, he explains that he wants to eliminate systems that are too insecure to prevent them from being enrolled in botnets created by "script kiddies". The author uses an argument already used by the authors of Brickerbot, a malware that broke millions of connected objects in 2017.
But fortunately, the author of Silexbot didn't have the courage to go that far.
Yesterday, another security researcher, Anit Anubhav, was able to talk to him.
It would be a 14-year-old teenager living in Europe. Faced with the media coverage of the case, he would have decided to stop the spread of his malware, to make himself forgotten.
Let us hope that he will definitively leave the world of pirates and that he will now focus on more constructive activities.
In any case, this story shows, once again, how easy it is to target connected objects.
Source : Beepling Computer
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