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Author of BrickerBot Malware Retires, Says He Bricked 10 Million IoT Devices (bleepingcomputer.com) 149

Posted by BeauHD from the time-has-come dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The author of BrickerBot -- the malware that bricks IoT devices -- has announced his retirement in an email to Bleeping Computer, also claiming to have bricked over 10 million devices since he started the "Internet Chemotherapy" project in November 2016. Similar to the authors of the Mirai malware, the BrickerBot developer dumped his malware's source code online, allowing other crooks to profit from his code. The code is said to contain at least one zero-day. In a farewell message left on hundreds of hacked routers, the BrickerBot author also published a list of incidents (ISP downtimes) he caused, while also admitting he is likely to have drawn the attention of law enforcement agencies. "There's also only so long that I can keep doing something like this before the government types are able to correlate my likely network routes (I have already been active for far too long to remain safe). For a while now my worst-case scenario hasn't been going to jail, but simply vanishing in the middle of the night as soon as some unpleasant government figures out who I am," the hacker said.
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Author of BrickerBot Malware Retires, Says He Bricked 10 Million IoT Devices More

Author of BrickerBot Malware Retires, Says He Bricked 10 Million IoT Devices

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  • For a while now my worst-case scenario hasn't been going to jail, but simply vanishing in the middle of the night as soon as some unpleasant government figures out who I am," the hacker said.

    It's 2017, FFS. In the West, that insane drivel stopped the day W left office, and is Putin going to throw you in the Gulag, or have a show trial, and the throw you in (a very nasty, but public) prison.

    • Putin will give you a polonium cocktail with cyanide chaser.

    • Do we know what country he is in?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by cdu13a ( 95385 )

      I don't think he means vanished into a prison or shallow grave. It's more likely a vanished in the way scientists connected to German weapons programs vanished from Germany at the end of ww2.

      aka you don't have a choice you are coming to work for us.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nutria ( 679911 )

        It's more likely a vanished in the way scientists connected to German weapons programs vanished from Germany at the end of ww2.

        Preposterous.

        #1 PAPERCLIP scientists were glad to go to the US (the two obvious reasons are "not wanting to be pick up by the Sovs" and "doing what they love in a land of milk and honey, compared to war-destroyed Germany") and continue working on rockets.

        #2 Forcing someone to be a secret hacker is guaranteed to get your secret documents sent to the Eneremy.

    • It's 2017, FFS. In the West, that insane drivel stopped the day W left office,

      Drone strikes on weddings. Extraordinary rendition... Gitmo. Yeah, Obama sure was different.

  • Yep - public service... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Thursday December 14, 2017 @01:09AM (#55736207)

    (1) He's destroying devices that destroy privacy in themselves
    (2) He's destroying devices that are insecure by design ... open Telnet ports

    Not crying for the owners of this junk. He's indeed doing the Internet a service...

    • So he sterilized the devices so the couldn't reproduce the same traits in future generation. Where have I heard that before?

    • Not crying for the owners of this junk. He's indeed doing the Internet a service...

      I am. Why should the end user pay for a manufacturer's .... I dare not call it a mistake. The world is full of people with wide skillsets in wide areas. You can't expect everyone to be an expert on everything. There are very few people out there with the capability of analysing their own network security.

      At the very least these things better be covered by warranty, or fit for service laws.

      • > You can't expect everyone to be an expert on everything.

        And even if they are, you can't expect everyone to spend uncountable amounts of time confirming everything from first principles.

        We have the lives we have because we specialize and regulate the specialists. I don't have to do destructive chemical and mechanical testing of my car tires to have confidence they are safe. I don't have to test samples of my morning cereal before sitting down to eat breakfast. I generally expect the probability of my

  • Thank you (Score:3, Insightful)

    by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Thursday December 14, 2017 @01:30AM (#55736267)

    This guy is my hero.

  • Times 10 million devices. A billion dollar lawsuit filed against an individual might break some records.
    And no, I'm not playing anything. Just noting something hypothetical here. Personally I want to see every buggy piece of shit IoT removed from the Internet. They can go start their own garbage network to run their shitbox hardware on.

  • Give this man a fucking prize.

    Seriously, IoT devices should come with goddamn warning labels.

    This device in known to the surgeon-general of cyberspace to pose a serous risk to your personal privacy, and the personal privacy of those around you. This device may also cause undesired network traffic, communicate with unauthorized systems, and promote the spread of malware to other network connected devices.

  • Headline should read: Author of BrickerBot Malware (Score:5, Funny)

    by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Thursday December 14, 2017 @02:25AM (#55736379) Homepage

    ... finally gets a job.

  • I am admittedly lazy. Can someone point me at his source. I couldn't find it in a cursory google search. I'm not planning to use it in the wild, just curious about which exploits he used exactly.

    thanks

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by plloi ( 1055946 )
      I know this is slashdot, but if you RTFA and click around a bit it's not hard to find.
  • This shit is a wake up call. Like how Watchdogs 1 and 2 was a wake up call hidden in a game. Lets not end up like the shit hole world like in watch dogs 2 where government and corporations have be come entirely nontransparent whilst your average Joe or Jane is so transparent that those nontransparent Political/Corporate entity can monitor every thing you do + metaphorically have their hand up your ass like a puppet e.g tampering with what you see so as to unfairly bias your vote choose i cite this from the

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