Analysis of DDoS-Capable IoT Malwares
Michele De Donno, Nicola Dragoni, Alberto Giaretta, Angelo Spognardi
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2017F288
Citation: Proceedings of the 2017 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, M. Ganzha, L. Maciaszek, M. Paprzycki (eds). ACSIS, Vol. 11, pages 807–816 (2017)
Abstract. The Internet of Things (IoT) revolution promises to make our lives easier by providing cheap and always connected smart embedded devices, that can interact and exchange useful information in Internet, creating new values for human needs. But all that glitters is not gold. Indeed, the other side of the coin is that, from a security perspective, this IoT revolution represents a potential disaster. This plethora of IoT devices that flooded the market were very badly protected and were easy pray of several different families of malware, being turned to elements of very large botnets. This, eventually, brought back to the top Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, making them more powerful and easier to achieve than ever. This paper aims at provide an up-to-date picture of the DDoS attack in the specific context of the IoT, studying how these attacks work, considering the most spread and effective malware families in the context IoT, in terms of their nature and evolution through the years. It also explores the additional offensive capabilities that the arsenal of recent IoT malware has available to mine the security of Internet users and systems. We think that this up-to-date picture will be a valuable reference to the scientific community in order to take a first crucial step to tackle this urgent security issue.
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