Fear The Reaper

In a prior post, we warned you that this was going to happen, that the series of bot attacks were a prelude to the real action.  Now it is here, the Reaper botnet attack is threatening to take down the Internet.  The best part?

There is nothing we can do about it.

As with the predecessor attacks, this attack is targeting IoT devices, taking them over and then using those devices to generate massive amounts of traffic that can be targeted towards anything – a company, building, city or region…or the entire Internet.  Imagine nothing working online, all online communications being offline and having nothing to use in terms of retaliation.

This is where we are – right now and the threat is not just “real”, it is literally going on as we speak.

Overcoming Will Be Hard

Bear can overcome this attack today.  We can lock down devices even if they are already infected.  Bear can prevent the spread of this botnet or any other malware that comes out in the future.  We literally have the solution in hand but there is a problem.

Deployment is a challenge.

There is no concept of Windows Update in the IoT – everything is a mishmash and can be easy or very difficult.  Fortunately, the same conduits the hackers are using to spread their botnet can be used to install Bear.  These hackers are picking the easy targets – no reason not to given the number of such devices – and thus Bear can readily install on those devices.

Other IoT devices, however, are much harder to get Bear onto.  These are mostly older IoT devices that were created prior to updates being a major consideration.  Bear can still install on any updateable devices but the effort increases with older iterations.

Time is running out – the entire virtual world is completely exposed and we need to act now…

It is already too late given the Reaper attack but we need to save what we can and protect ourselves moving forward.