KrebsOnSecurity received many a missive over the past 24 hours from readers who wanted to know why I’d not written about widespread media reports that Mirai — a malware strain made from hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices such as poorly secured routers and IP cameras — was used to knock the entire country of Liberia offline. The trouble is, as far as I can tell no such nationwide outage actually occurred.

First, a quick recap on Mirai: This blog was taken offline in September following a record 620 Gpbs attack launched by a Mirai botnet. The source code for Mirai was leaked online at the end of September. Since then, the code has been forked several times, resulting in the emergence of several large Mirai-based botnets. In late October, many of the Internet’s top destinations went offline for the better part of a day when Mirai was used to attack Internet infrastructure firm Dyn.

Enter Kevin Beaumont, a security architect from Liverpool, England who on Thursday published a piece on Medium.com about an attack by Mirai against Liberia. Beaumont had been researching the output of an automated Twitter account set up by security researchers to monitor attacks from these various Mirai botnets. That Twitter account, @MiraiAttacks, burps out a tweet with each new Mirai attack, listing the targeted Internet address, the attack type, and the observed duration of the attack.

Beamont’s story noted that a botnet based on Mirai was seen attacking the telecommunications infrastructure in the West African nation of Liberia. Citing anonymous sources, Beaumont said transit providers confirmed an attack of more than 500 Gpbs targeting Liberia’s lone underseas large-transit Internet cable, which Beaumont said “provides a single point of failure for internet access.”

“From monitoring we can see websites hosted in country going offline during the attacks,” Beaumont wrote. “Additionally, a source in country at a Telco has confirmed to a journalist they are seeing intermittent internet connectivity, at times which directly match the attack. The attacks are extremely worrying because they suggest a Mirai operator who has enough capacity to seriously impact systems in a nation state.”

Not long after Beamont’s story went live, a piece at The Hacker News breathlessly announced that hackers using Mirai had succeeded in knocking Liberia off the Internet. The Hacker News piece includes nifty graphics and images of Liberia’s underseas Internet cables. Soon after, ZDNet picked up the outage angle, as did the BBC and The Guardian and a host of other news outlets.

The only problem that I can see with these stories is that there does not appear to have been anything close to a country-wide outage as a result of this Mirai attack.

Daniel Brewer, general manager for the Cable Consortium of Liberia, confirmed that his organization has fielded inquiries from news outlets and other interest groups following multiple media reports of a nationwide outage. But he could not point to the reason.

“Both our ACE submarine cable monitoring systems and servers hosted (locally) in LIXP (Liberia Internet Exchange Point) show no downtime in the last 3 weeks,” Brewer said. “While it is likely that a local operator might have experienced a brief outage, we have no knowledge of a national Internet outage and there are no data to [substantiate] that.”

Yes, multiple sources confirm that Mirai was used to launch an attack exceeding 500 Gbps against a mobile telecom provider in Liberia, but those sources also say the provider in question had a denial-of-service attack mitigation plan in place that kicked into action shortly after the attack began.

This was confirmed in a tweet on Thursday by Dyn. The company said in a separate tweet that routing in Liberia has been stable for days.

Akamai, a company with a global Internet presence and visibility, said it saw a dip in traffic levels from Liberia. Akamai tweeted a graphic Thursday evening that indicated traffic to Liberia was lower than normal as compared to traffic patterns from previous days this week. But there was nothing to indicate a nationwide outage, and the dip in traffic may just as well have to do with the fact that the first Thursday of November in Liberia is Thanksgiving, a public holiday there.

“Neither @dynresearch nor @akamai_soti have data supporting the assertion that Liberia suffered a national outage,” tweeted Dyn’s Doug Madory.

To recap: Did a Mirai botnet attack an infrastructure provider in Liberia? No question. Is the IoT problem bad enough that we have to worry about entire countries being knocked offline? Quite possibly. Was there an outage that knocked the country of Liberia offline this week? I have yet to see the evidence to support that claim.

Way back in the last millennium when I was a lowly copy aide at The Washington Post, I pitched the Metro Section editor on an idea for new column: “And the Good News Is…” The editor laughed me out of her office. But I still think it’s a decent idea — particularly in the context of cybersecurity — to periodically highlight the good news when people allegedly responsible for spewing so much badness online are made to face justice.

In the United Kingdom this week, 14 people were arrested on suspicion of laundering at least £11 million (~USD $13.7M) on behalf of thieves who stole the money using sophisticated banking Trojans like Dridex and Dyre. A statement issued by the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) said 13 men and a woman, aged between 23 and 52, were arrested in the roundup, including a number of foreign nationals.

The NCA warned in a report released this year that cybercrime had overtaken traditional crime in the United Kingdom. According to the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics, there were 2.46 million cyber incidents and 2.11 million victims of cybercrime in the U.K. in 2015.

Also in the U.K., 19-year-old Adam Mudd pleaded guilty to operating and profiting from Titanium Stresser, an attack-for-hire or “booter” service that could be hired to knock Web sites offline. When U.K. authorities arrested Mudd at his home last year, they found detailed records of the attack service’s customers and victims, which included evidence of more than 1.7 million attacks. Prosecutors say Mudd launched the service when he was 15 years old.

As I noted in this 2014 story, the source code for Titanium Stresser was later used by miscreants with the Lizard Squad hacking group to power their Lizard Stresser attack service. Happily, two other 19-year-olds were arrested earlier this month and accused of operating the Lizard Stresser attack service. It’s nice to see authorities here and abroad sending a message that operating booter service can land you in jail, full stop.

Back stateside, a Florida man has pleaded guilty to hacking and spamming the world with ads for online pharmacies and other businesses eager to buy dodgy customer leads. Timothy Livingston, 31, acknowledged that he and his company — aptly named “A Whole Lot of Nothing LLC” — earned more than $1.3 million using countless hacked email accounts and huge collections of compromised computers to relay the junk missives.

Livingston could hardly be a better caricature of the typical spammer. Living in Florida (Boca Raton) and lavishly spending his ill-gotten gains on a flashy lifestyle. As part of his plea, Livingston agreed to forfeit $1,346,442, as well as a 2009 Cadillac Escalade and a 2006 Ferrari F430 Spider.

Citing a computer virus outbreak, a hospital system in the United Kingdom has canceled all planned operations and diverted major trauma cases to neighboring facilities. The incident came as U.K. leaders detailed a national cyber security strategy that promises billions in cybersecurity spending, new special police units to pursue organized online gangs, and the possibility of retaliation for major attacks.

In a “major incident” alert posted to its Web site, the National Health Service’s Lincolnshire and Goole trust said it made the decision to cancel surgeries and divert trauma patients after a virus infected its electronic systems on Sunday, October 30.

“We have taken the decision, following expert advise, to shut down the majority of our systems so we can isolate and destroy it,” the NHS said, of the unspecified malware infection. “All planned operations, outpatient appointments and diagnostic procedures have been cancelled for Wednesday, Nov. 2 with a small number of exceptions.”

The advisory continued:

“Inpatients will continue to be cared for and discharged as soon as they are medically fit. Major trauma cases will continue to be diverted to neighboring hospitals as will high risk women in labour.”

Although the NHS didn’t say what kind of virus infected its systems, it is likely an infestation of ransomware — a malware scourge whose purveyors have taken to targeting hospitals and healthcare facilities.

Ransomware scours an infected computer for documents, audio files, pictures and other things likely to be of value to the system’s owner, and then encrypts that data with very powerful encryption software. Most ransomware variants also scour the local network for other systems or network shares to infect. Victims usually can only get their files back after paying a specified ransom demand using a virtual currency, such as Bitcoin.

Earlier this year, experts began noticing that cybercriminals were using ransomware to target hospitals — organizations that are heavily reliant on instant access to patient records. In March 2016, Henderson, Ky.-based Methodist Hospital shut down its computer systems after an infection from the Locky strain of ransomware. Just weeks before that attack, a California hospital that was similarly besieged with ransomware paid a $17,000 ransom to get its files back.

According to a recent report by Intel Security, the healthcare sector is experiencing over 20 data loss incidents per day related to ransomware attacks. The company said it identified almost $100,000 in payments from hospital ransomware victims to specific bitcoin accounts so far in 2016.

As dependent as healthcare systems are on computers and information technology, the notion that a computer virus could result in bodily injury or death is no longer the stuff of Hollywood movie scripts. Unfortunately, the healthcare industry is for the most part still catching up in its ability to anticipate, prevent and respond to these types of cyber attacks.

As macabre as it may sound, perhaps people dying because of poor cybersecurity is exactly what it will take for more organizations to dedicate the necessary resources toward adequately defending the systems upon which they so heavily rely.

In 2010, I was interviewed by Team Cyrmu‘s Steve Santorelli as part of their ongoing Who and Why Show. Santorelli gave me a few minutes to answer the question, “What keeps you up at night?” My answer was basically that I worry what will happen to the Internet as we know it when people start to die in a measurable way because of computer and Internet security vulnerabilities and attacks. Here’s the entire interview if anyone cares to have a listen.

The crippling of NHS’s systems came as U.K. Chancellor Philip Hammond unveiled a national cybersecurity strategy, warning that hostile “foreign actors” were developing techniques that threaten the country’s electrical grid and airports, among other critical infrastructure.

“If we want Britain to be the best place in the world to be a tech business then it is also crucial that Britain is a safe place to do the digital business,” Hammond said Tuesday as he described the National Cyber Security Strategy in London. “Trust in the internet and the infrastructure on which it relies is fundamental to our economic future.”

What can businesses do to lessen the chances of having their critical infrastructure crippled by malware like ransomware? The FBI has the following tips:

• Regularly back up data and verify the integrity of those backups. Backups are critical in ransomware incidents; if you are infected, backups may be the best way to recover your critical data.
• Secure your backups. Ensure backups are not connected to the computers and networks they are backing up. Examples might include securing backups in the cloud or physically storing them offline. It should be noted, some instances of ransomware have the capability to lock cloud-based backups when systems continuously back up in real-time, also known as persistent synchronization.
• Scrutinize links contained in e-mails and do not open attachments included in unsolicited e-mails.
• Only download software – especially free software – from sites you know and trust. When possible, verify the integrity of the software through a digital signature prior to execution.
• Ensure application patches for the operating system, software, and firmware are up to date, including Adobe Flash, Java, Web browsers, etc.
• Ensure anti-virus and anti-malware solutions are set to automatically update and regular scans are conducted.
• Disable macro scripts from files transmitted via e-mail. Consider using Office Viewer software to open Microsoft Office files transmitted via e-mail instead of full Office Suite applications.
• Implement software restrictions or other controls to prevent the execution of programs in common ransomware locations, such as temporary folders supporting popular Internet browsers, or compression/decompression programs, including those located in the AppData/LocalAppData folder.

Additional considerations for businesses include the following:

• Focus on awareness and training. Because end users are often targeted, employees should be made aware of the threat of ransomware, how it is delivered, and trained on information security principles and techniques.
• Patch all endpoint device operating systems, software, and firmware as vulnerabilities are discovered. This precaution can be made easier through a centralized patch management system.
• Manage the use of privileged accounts by implementing the principle of least privilege. No users should be assigned administrative access unless absolutely needed. Those with a need for administrator accounts should only use them when necessary; they should operate with standard user accounts at all other times.
• Configure access controls with least privilege in mind. If a user only needs to read specific files, he or she should not have write access to those files, directories, or shares.
• Use virtualized environments to execute operating system environments or specific programs.
• Categorize data based on organizational value, and implement physical/logical separation of networks and data for different organizational units. For example, sensitive research or business data should not reside on the same server and/or network segment as an organization’s e-mail environment.
• Require user interaction for end user applications communicating with Web sites uncategorized by the network proxy or firewall. Examples include requiring users to type in information or enter a password when the system communicates with an uncategorized Web site.
• Implement application whitelisting. Only allow systems to execute programs known and permitted by security policy.

Further reading: SC Magazine UK’s take on the attack.

Perhaps the most bustling marketplace on the Internet where people can compare and purchase so-called “booter” and “stresser” subscriptions — attack-for-hire services designed to knock Web sites offline — announced last week that it has permanently banned the sale and advertising of these services.

On Friday, Oct. 28, Jesse LaBrocca — the administrator of the popular English-language hacking forum Hackforums[dot]net — said he was shutting down the “server stress testing” (SST) section of the forum. The move comes amid heightened public scrutiny of the SST industry, which has been linked to several unusually powerful recent attacks and is responsible for the vast majority of denial-of-service (DOS) attacks on the Internet today.

“Unfortunately once again the few ruin it for the many,” LaBrocca wrote under his Hackforums alias “Omniscient.” “I’m personally disappointed that this is the path I have to take in order to protect the community. I loathe having to censor material that could be beneficial to members. But I need to make sure that we continue to exist and given the recent events I think it’s more important that the section be permanently shut down.”

Last month, a record-sized DDoS hit KrebsOnSecurity.com. The attack was launched with the help of Mirai, a malware strain that enslaves poorly security Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices like CCTV cameras and digital video recorders and uses them to launch crippling attacks.

At the end of September, a Hackforums user named “Anna_Senpai” used the forum to announce the release the source code for Mirai. A week ago, someone used Mirai to launch a massive attack on Internet infrastructure firm Dyn, which for the better part of a day lead to sporadic outages for some of the Web’s top destinations, including Twitter, PayPal, Reddit and Netflix.

As I noted in last week’s story Are the Days of Booter Services Numbered?, many booter service owners have been operating under the delusion or rationalization that their services are intended solely for Web site owners to test the ability of their sites to withstand data deluges.

Whatever illusions booter service operators or users may have harbored about their activities should have been dispelled following a talk delivered at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this year. In that speech, FBI Agent Elliott Peterson issued an unambiguous warning that the agency was prepared to investigate and help prosecute people engaged in selling and buying from booter services.

But it wasn’t until this month’s attack on Dyn that LaBrocca warned the Hackforums community he may have to shut down the SST section.

“I can’t image this attention is going to be a good thing,” Omni said in an October 26, 2016 thread titled “Bad things.” “Already a Senator is calling for a hearing on the Internet of Things [link added]. In the end there could be new laws which effect [sic] us all. So for those responsible for the attacks and creating this mess….you dun goofed. I expect a lot of backlash to come out of this.”

If LaBrocca appears steamed from this turn of events, it’s probably with good reason: He stands to lose a fair amount of regular income by banning some of the most lucrative businesses on his forum. Vendors on Hackforums pay fees as high as $25 apiece to achieve a status that allows them to post new sales threads, and banner ads on the forum can run up to $200 per week.

Vendors who wish to “sticky” their ads — that is, pay to keep the ads displayed prominently near or at the top of a given discussion subforum — pay LaBrocca up to $60 per week for the prime sticky spots. And there were dozens of booter services advertised on Hackforums.

Allison Nixon, director of security research at Flashpoint and an expert on booter services, said the move could put many booter services out of business.

Nixon said the average booter service customer uses the attack services to settle grudges with opponents in online games, and that the closure of the SST subforum may make these services less attractive to those individuals.

“There is probably a lesser likelihood that the average gamer will see these services and think that it’s an okay idea to purchase them,” Nixon said. “The ease of access to these booters services makes people think it’s okay to use them. In gaming circles, for example, people will often use them to DDoS one another and not realize they might be shutting down an innocent person’s network. Recognizing that this is criminal activity on the same level of criminal hacking and fraud may discourage people from using these services, meaning the casual actor may be less likely to buy a booter subscription and launch DDoS attacks.”

Although the closure of the SST subforum could put many booter services out of business, the action almost seems somewhat arbitrary given the sheer amount of other illegal hacking activity that is blatantly advertised on Hackforums, Nixon said.

“It’s interesting the norms that are on this forum because they’re so different from how you or I would recognize acceptable behavior,” she said. “For example, most people would think it’s not acceptable to see booter services advertised alongside remote access Trojans, malware crypting services and botnets.”

Other questionable services and subsections advertised on Hackforums include those intended for the sale of hacked social media and e-commerce accounts. More shocking are the dozens of threads wherein Hackforums members advertise the sale of “girl slaves,” essentially access to hacked computers belonging to teenage girls who can be extorted and exploited for payment or naked pictures. It’s worth noting that the youth who was arrested for snapping nude pictures of Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf through her webcam was a regular user of Hackforums.

Nixon said most Hackforums users are essentially good people who are interested in learning more about technology, security and other topics. But she said many of the younger, impressionable members are heavily influenced by some of the more senior forum participants, a number of whom are peddling dangerous products and services.

“Most of the stuff on Hackforuns is not that bad,” Nixon said. “There are a lot of kids who are pretty much normal people and interested in hacking and technology. But there are also gangs, and there are definitely criminal organizations that have a presence on the forum that will try to enable criminal activity and take advantage of people.”

The removal of booter services from Hackforums is a gratifying development for me personally and professionally. My site has been under near-constant attack from users of these booter services for several years now. As a result, I have sought to bring more public attention to these crooked businesses and to the young men who’ve earned handsome profits operating over the years. Here are just a few of those stories:

Stress Testing the Booter Services, Financially

Are the Days of Booter Services Numbered?

Israeli Online Attack Service ‘vDOS’ Earned $600,000 in Two Years

Ragebooter: Legit DDoS Service, or Fed Backdoor?

DDoS Services Advertise Openly, Take PayPal

Booter Shells Turn Web Sites Into Weapons

Spreading the DDoS Disease and Selling the Cure

Lizard Stresser Runs on Hacked Home Routers

The New Normal: 200-400 Gpbs DDoS Attacks

It may soon become easier for Internet service providers to anticipate and block certain types of online assaults launched by Web-based attack-for-hire services known as “booter” or “stresser” services, new research released today suggests.

The findings come from researchers in Germany who’ve been studying patterns that emerge when miscreants attempt to mass-scan the entire Internet looking for systems useful for launching these digital sieges — known as “distributed denial-of-service” or DDoS attacks.

To understand the significance of their research, it may help to briefly examine how DDoS attacks have evolved. Not long ago, if one wanted to take down large Web site, one had to build and maintain a large robot network, or “botnet,” of hacked computers — which is a fairly time intensive, risky and technical endeavor.

These days, however, even the least sophisticated Internet user can launch relatively large DDoS attacks just by paying a few bucks for a subscription to one of dozens of booter or stresser services, some of which even accept credit cards and PayPal payments.

These Web-based DDoS-for-hire services don’t run on botnets: They generally employ a handful of powerful servers that are rented from some dodgy “bulletproof” hosting provider. The booter service accepts payment and attack instructions via a front end Web site that is hidden behind Cloudflare (a free DDoS protection service).

But the back end of the booter service is where the really interesting stuff happens. Virtually all of the most powerful and effective attack types used by booter services rely on a technique called traffic amplification and reflection, in which the attacker can reflect or “spoof” his traffic from one or more third-party machines toward the intended target.

In this type of assault, the attacker sends a message to a third party, while spoofing the Internet address of the victim. When the third party replies to the message, the reply is sent to the victim — and the reply is much larger than the original message, thereby amplifying the size of the attack.

To find vulnerable systems that can be leveraged this way, booters employ large-scale Internet scanning services that constantly seek to refresh the list of systems that can be used for amplification and reflection attacks. They do this because, as research has shown (PDF), anywhere from 40-50 percent of the amplifiers vanish or are reassigned new Internet addresses after one week.

Enter researchers from Saarland University in Germany, as well as the Yokohama National University and National Institute of Information and Communications Technology — both in Japan. In a years-long project first detailed in 2015, the researchers looked for scanning that appeared to be kicked off by ne’er-do-wells running booter services.

To accomplish this, the research team built a kind of distributed “honeypot” system — which they dubbed “AmpPot” — designed to mimic services known to be vulnerable to amplification attacks, such as DNS and NTP floods.

“To make them attractive to attackers, our honeypots send back legitimate responses,” the researchers wrote in a 2015 paper (PDF). “Attackers, in turn, will abuse these honeypots as amplifiers, which allows us to observe ongoing attacks, their victims, and the DDoS techniques. To prevent damage caused by our honeypots, we limit the response rate. This way, while attackers can still find these ratelimited honeypots, the honeypots stop replying in the face of attacks.”

In that 2015 paper, the researchers said they deployed 21 globally-distributed AmpPot instances, which observed more than 1.5 million attacks between February and May 2015. Analyzing the attacks more closely, they found that more than 96% of the attacks stem from single sources, such as booter services.

“When focusing on amplification DDoS attacks, we find that almost all of them (>96%) are caused by single sources (e.g. booters), and not botnets,” the team concluded. “However, we sadly do not have the numbers to compare this [to] DoS attacks in general.”

Many large-scale Internet scans like the ones the researchers sought to measure are launched by security firms and other researchers, so the team needed a way to differentiate between scans launched by booter services and those conducted for research or other benign purposes.

“To distinguish between scans performed by researchers and scans performed with malicious intent we relied on a simple assumption: That no attack would be based on the results of a scan performed by (ethical) researchers,” said Johannes Krupp, one of the main authors of the report. “In fact, thanks to our methodology, we do not have to make this distinction upfront, but we can rather look at the results and say: ‘We found attacks linked to this scanner, therefore this scanner must have been malicious.’ If a scan was truly performed by benign parties, we will not find attacks linked to it.”

SECRET IDENTIFIERS

What’s new in the paper being released today by students at Saarland University’s Center for IT-Security, Privacy and Accountability (CISPA) is the method by which the researchers were able to link these mass-scans to the very amplification attacks that follow soon after.

The researchers worked out a way to encode a secret identifier into the set of AmpPot honeypots that any subsequent attack will use, which varies per scan source. They then tested to see if the scan infrastructure was also used to actually launch (and not just to prepare) the attacks.

Their scheme was based in part on the idea that similar traffic sources should have to travel similar Internet distances to reach the globally-distributed AmpPot sensors. To do this, they looked at the number of “hops” or Internet network segments that each scan and attack had to traverse.

Using trilateration –the process of determining absolute or relative locations of points by measurement of distances — the research team was able to link scanners to attack origins based on hop counts.

These methods revealed some 286 scanners that are used by booter services in preparation for launching amplification attacks. Further, they discovered that roughly 75 percent of those scanners are located in the United States.

The researchers say they were able to confirm that many of the same networks that host scanners are also being used to launch the attacks. More significantly, they were able to attribute approximately one-third of the attacks back to their origin.

“This is an impressive result, given that the spoofed source of amplification attacks usually remains hidden,” said Christian Rossow of Saarland University.

Rosso said the team hopes to conduct further research on their methods to more definitively tie scanning and attack activity to specific booter services by name. The group is already offering a service to hosting providers and ISPs to share information about incidents (such as attack start and end times). Providers can then use the attack information to inform their customers or to filter attack traffic.

“We have shared our findings with law enforcement agencies — in particular, Europol and the FBI — and a closed circle of tier-1 network providers that use our insights on an operational basis,” the researchers wrote. “Our output can be used as forensic evidence both in legal complaints and in ways to add social pressure against spoofing sources.”

ANALYSIS

Even if these newly-described discovery methods were broadly deployed today, it’s unlikely that booter services would be going away anytime soon. But this research certainly holds the promise that booter service owners will be able to hide the true location of their operations less successfully going forward. and that perhaps more of them will be held accountable for their crimes.

Efforts by other researchers have made it more difficult for booter and stresser services to accept PayPal payments, forcing more booters to rely more on Bitcoin.

Also, there are a number of initiatives that seek to identify a handful of booter services which resell their infrastructure to other services who brand and market them as their own. Case in point, in September 2016 I published an expose on vDOS, a booter service that earned (conservatively) $600,000 over two years helping to launch more than 150,000 DDoS attacks.

Turns out, vDOS’s infrastructure was used by more than a half-dozen other booter services, and shortly after vDOS was taken offline most of those services went dark or were dismantled as well.

One major shift that could help to lessen the appeal of booter services — both for the profit-seeking booter proprietors and their customers — is a clear sign from law enforcement officials that this activity is in fact illegal and punishable by real jail time. So far, many booter service owners have been operating under the delusion or rationalization that their services are intended solely for Web site owners to test the ability of their sites to withstand data deluges. The recent arrest of two alleged Lizard Squad members who resold vDOS services through their own “PoodleStresser” service is a good start.

Many booter operators apparently believe (or at least hide behind) a wordy “terms of service” agreement that all customers must acknowledge somehow absolves them of any sort of liability for how their customers use the service — regardless of how much hand-holding and technical support they offer those customers.

Indeed, the proprietors of vDOS — who were arrested shortly after my story about them — told the Wall Street Journal through their attorneys that, “If I was to buy a gun and shoot something, is the person that invents the gun guilty?”

The alleged proprietors of vDOS — 18-year-old Israelis Yarden Bidani and Itay Huri — were released from house arrest roughly ten days after their initial arrest. To date, no charges have been filed against either men, but I have reason to believe that may not be the case for long.

Meanwhile, changes may be afoot for booter services advertised at Hackforums[dot]net, probably the biggest open-air online marketplace where booter services are advertised, compared and rated (hat tip to @MalwareTechblog). Earlier this week, Hackforums administrator Jesse “Omniscient” LaBrocca began restricting access to its “stressers” subsection of the sprawling forum, and barring forum members from advertising booter services in their user profiles.

“I can absolutely see a day when it’s removed entirely,” LaBrocca said in a post explaining his actions. “Could be very soon too.”

My worry is that we may soon see a pendulum shift in the way that many booter services operate. For now, the size of attacks launched by booter services is somewhat dependent on the number and power of the back-end servers used to initiate amplification and reflection attacks.

However, I could see a day in the not-too-distant future in which booter service operators start earning most of their money by reselling far more powerful attacks launched by actual botnets made from large networks of hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices — such as poorly-secured CCTV cameras and digital video recorders (DVRs).

In some ways this has already happened, as I detailed in my January 2015 story, Lizard Stresser Runs on Hacked Home Routers. But with the now public release of the source code for the Mirai botnet — the same malware strain that was used in the record 620 Gbps DDoS on my site last month and in the widespread Internet outage last week caused by an attack against infrastructure provider Dyn — far more powerful and scalable attacks are now available for resale.

A copy of the paper released today at the ACM CSS conference in Vienna is available here (PDF).