Tag: IoT

Executive Summary The Internet of Things (IoT) and, specifically, the hunt for exploitable IoT devices by attackers, has been a primary area of research for F5 Labs for over a year now—and with good reason. IoT devices are becoming the “cyberweapon delivery system of choice” by today’s botnet-building attackers. And, why not? There are literally…

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On the shoulders of manufacturers lies the responsibility to address vulnerabilities, because the next generation of thingbots is taking advantage of known vulnerabilities to gain control of devices. Persirai is an adaptation of Mirai that shares code as well as command and control servers, but targets all models of IP cameras from a single Chinese…

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Figure 5. 60 seconds C&C polling interval   However, although the malware is still evolving, it has good market differentiation in its HTTP functionality. Being based on Android’s WebView class, the thingbot is better equipped with browser-like functionality, making it more resistant to various bot challenges, such as cookie support, redirects, and JavaScript, which are…

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Cybercrime in general—and most recently, crime perpetrated using IoT devices—has become a serious problem. Legislatures around the world have struggled to write laws to rein things in. The problem has been that governments have issued cybersecurity laws that are either too burdensome or ineffective. We’ve seen various breach disclosure acts designed to “name and shame”…

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Another week, another threat. This week dawned with a spate of twitchy fingers telling us about the latest monster to emerge from the closets: KRACK. KRACK stands for Key Reinstallation Attack. You can read the details of this one on a variety of sites including Arstechnica,1 Verge,2 and, as befitting the seriousness of this one, its own website.3…

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I recently had the opportunity to sit down with two of F5’s top threat researchers, Sara Boddy and Justin Shattuck, to pick their brains about IoT, its current state of “security,” and what we can expect to see in terms of threats, attacks, and mitigations in the future. Justin and Sara are co-authors of three IoT threat research…

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This isn’t your mama’s botnet. This is a proper botnet. If you were the world’s best IoT botnet builder and you wanted to show the world how well-crafted an IoT botnet could be, Reaper is what you’d build. It hasn’t been seen attacking anyone yet, and that is part of its charm. But, what is…

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Internet of Things (IoT) devices gained infamy almost overnight for their lack of security. This led to their participation in a Thingbot (a botnet built out of IoT devices) named Mirai1 that launched massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a handful of victims, including Dyn, OVH, KrebsOnSecurity, and Rutgers University2 in late 2016. As a result of…

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  Sure, the C&C list is a small sample size, and C&C hosts come and go quickly. This list is in no way exhaustive—it’s just a snapshot in time from last quarter. But for a breakdown of the domain hosting services, see the end of this article. “Yes, I really am a C&C server.” A…

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We’re celebrating our one-year anniversary here at F5 Labs, the application threat intelligence division of F5! Although F5 researchers have been providing threat-related, F5-specific guidance to our customers for many years through DevCentral, the time was right a year ago today to launch a dedicated website that provides the general public with vendor-neutral, application-focused, actionable…

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