Mēris Botnet Goes Global

The Russian Internet giant Yandex has been the target of a record-breaking Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack known as Mēris. The botnet is believed to have attacked the company's web infrastructure with millions of HTTP requests, before hitting a peak of 21.8 million requests per second. 

The Mēris  botnet, which has been seen since June 2021 is made up of around 250K malware-infected devices and is behind some of the largest recent DDoS attacks.

For the last five years, there have virtually been almost no global-scale application-layer attacks and during this period and cyber security professionals have learned how to cope with the high bandwidth network layer attacks, including amplification-based ones. 

Mēris, (the Latvian word for “plague”)  has been primarily used as part of a DDoS extortion campaign against Internet service providers and financial entities across several countries, such as UK, US, New Zealand and now Russia. What has been confirmed about the Mēris botnet is that it uses HTTP pipeline technology for DDoS attacks. Researchers have linked Mēris to a DDoS attack in August tracked by Cloudflare. 

The group behind the botnet typically sends menacing emails to large companies asking for a ransom payment. The emails, which target companies with extensive online infrastructure and which can’t afford any downtime, contain threats to take down crucial servers if the group is not paid a certain amount of crypto-currency by a deadline.

If victims don’t pay, the hackers unleash their botnet in smaller attacks at the beginning that substantially grow in size with time in order to put pressure on the victims.

The biggest contributor to the IoT botnet problem is the plethora of companies white-labelling IoT devices that were never designed with security in mind and are often shipped to the customer in default-insecure states, mainly because these devices tend to be far cheaper than more secure alternatives. There is a suggestion that the botnet could grow in force through password brute-forcing, which looks like some vulnerability that was either kept secret before the current massive campaign began or sold on the black market.

The Record:    Gigazine:     Brian Krebs:      Qrator:         Threatpost:         Mikrotik:      Hacker News: 

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