Minecraft Link To Net's Biggest Botnet
Minecraft link to the world's largest botnet
Malware that led to the internet's biggest ever cyber-attack in the year 2000 had links to Minecraft servers as per the experts who were investigating it.
Security blogger Brian Krebs has spent months studying the attack that knocked his blog offline.
He claims that the genesis of the Mirai botnet can be traced back to rivalries in the Minecraft community.
His claims are backed up by a security expert who provided security on the net for Minecraft servers.
Robert Coelho, vice president of security firm ProxyPipe, told the BBC that his suspicions about who was behind the Mirai code have been passed to the FBI who are "actively looking into" the claims.
Mirai is a botnet that includes more than 500,000 connected devices, including routers and cameras, was created.
The attacks it launched - so-called denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that hit websites with such a large amount of data they fall over they were the largest the net had ever experienced.
Reddit, Spotify, and Twitter were among the victims.
"Hundreds of hours"
Shortly after the attacks, the individual who claimed responsibility - using the codename Anna Senpai published the source code online, which paved the way for copies of the attacks.
Later, a modified version of the malware was used to attack UK internet service providers TalkTalk or the Post Office.
Krebs spent "hundreds of hour" investigating the Mirai botnet attack in September 2016.
"If you've ever wondered why it seems that so few cyber criminals are prosecuted, I can tell you that the sheer amount of persistence and investigative resources needed to determine who's been responsible for what (and why) in the age of the internet is tremendous," he wrote.
His research led him to Minecraft, a computer program now owned by Microsoft that lets users build things using cubic blocks.
It is loved by many, especially children, and is played by over a million people at any given time.
Mr Krebs claims that a Minecraft server with over 1,000 players could earn $50,000 per month (PS40,600). This is due to the fact that players renting space to create their Minecraft worlds.
"The first clues to Anna Senpai's identity weren't clear until I understood that Mirai was just the latest version of an IoT [internet of things] botnet family that has been in development and relatively widely used for three years," he writes.
He claims that the code for older versions was used to knock down servers hosting Minecraft.
ProxyPipe owned by Mr. Coelho has a large number of Minecraft servers as clients. The server in mid-2015, it was hit by a massive attack, launched from a botnet comprised of IoT devices such as web cameras.
Mr Coelho told the BBC that he was able to confirm his suspicions regarding the person responsible for the attack: "Minecraft is a tight knit community. We know who is talking to who."
He claimed that the attack was carried out by a security firm that was a competitor that also offered DDoS protection for Minecraft clients.
He claimed that the founder of the security firm had previously run the Minecraft web server and was one of his clients.
He claims that Anna Senpai, the Mirai author approached him via Skype at September's end to explain that the attack on his company was "not personal" and to boast about how he had been paid by owners of a massive Minecraft server for launching an attack on a competitor server.
What is a DDoS attack?
7 March 2016
"Smart" devices are used in cyberattacks
22 October 2016