EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Beginning in August 2016, two men, Josiah White and Paras Jah, began designing a massive network of infected internet-connected devices–many of which were internet-enabled security cameras–to create a botnet with unprecedented scale and power to disrupt.

Joseph Cox from The Daily Beast reports that White was responsible for creating the hunt/scan aspect of the botnet, which would search for devices to hijack. Pas and co-conspirators, meanwhile, were focused on writing code to direct the devices.

Court papers indicate that the men infected hundreds of thousands of devices as part of a massive network to launch distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). Among their targets: hosting company OVH and the website of cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs.

From the men’s plea agreement: “White and his co-conspirators built the botnet in order to […] create a weapon capable of initiating powerful denial of service attacks against business competitors and others against whom White and his co-conspirators held grudges against.” Cox adds that court documents reveal that the botnet was also designed to be rented out for a profit, and to extort hosting companies and other targets.

In addition, the Mirai botnet was also use to hit domain name server (DNS) provider Dyn, and impact Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, CNN, and others. But as Cox reports, that attack is believed to have been launched by other hackers, not the original architects of the botnet.

Read the full story at The Daily Beast.