The Mirai threat: How Hackers could shut off 23 Countries access to the internet

 2016 saw a lot of h*ck activities increased as the year rolled by. From the DDOS attack on Krebs site to DYN which brought down a section of the internet, to the US presidential candidates email hacks, Tesco bank h*ck and a lot of other h*ck activities that followed this trail.

 Last week Friday the Cyber-attack took a new turn. The new DDoS attack was targeted towards a particular Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Liberia, Lonestar Cell MTN the only ISP rendering internet service to the country. Internet users in the country are not much, years of long civil wars brought damage to most of the infrastructure in the country. Liberia has one internet cable that provides internet for the country, making it an easy target.

  Kevin Beaumont reports of the attack saying that,"a source in the country at a Telco (had) 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."

 What's interesting here isn't the attack on Liberia's internet but the threat those h*ckers posses. The African Cable to Europe (ACE) Submarine Communication cable which stretches along the West African coast from France to South Africa is to provide broadband connectivity to more than 23 countries in Europe and Africa.

 According to Ace-submarine cable, the fiber optic cable has the potential capacity of 5.12 Tbps  which is made possible by the new 40 Gbps technology.

Here's the scary part. OVH was DDoS with close to over 1Tbs from over 152,000 hacked devices. ACE fiber optic cable output capacity is 5.12 Tbps. If 152,000 hacked devices could release close to 1Tbs junk traffic then just imagine what over 1million hacked devices would do to the internet service in these 23 countries which relies on the ACE fiber cable for their connection.

Map showing the countries sharing the submarine fiber cable for internet connection

  The Mirai malware is capable of crippling internet connection in these 23 countries but a recently discovered flaw in the botnet shows that its actually possible to thwart the threat posed by this malware. White hackers can use this flaw to take the Mirai infected devices off the reach of these h*ckers.

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Mirai botnet malware cripple internet connection, How Mirai cripples 23 countries internet connection, IoT 1million h*cked devices,