Week 6 Studio: Mirai

There is a longform WIRED article that describes the three people who created the Mirai botnet, from their perspectives. Since WIRED has a paywall that costs money, I have posted the article to Canvas (under “Files”). Please read the whole article. It is about 90 pages, but it is relatively easy to read.

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Motivations

There were three teenage boys invovled in this attack. What were their motivations?

Here is my list of the different motivations they described in the article. Did I miss any?

• Showing off for friends
• Technical interest in the topic
• Making money to live
• Avoiding law enforcement attention
• Family expectations of being an entreprenuer

Are there others that I missed?

Actions

In the article, the teenage boys did a lot of different things over the course of years that culminated in the Mirai botnet attacks. Here is a list of actions I came up with

• Developing Qbot
• Posting Qbot on forum
• Creating Mirai botnet
• Creating early booter service
• Creating mirai booter service
• Using anime theme and server in France
• Attempting to “go legit” with ProTraf
• Turning ProTraf into a protection racket
• Trying to block Brazilian guy DDoS’ing Krebs
• Pivoting to click fraud
• Posting Mirai source

Connecting Motivations to Actions

As an exercise, go through the list of actions, and try to ascribe a motivation to each one. What was the primary motivation for the Mirai team to do each of those actions? Why do you think that? (Was the motivation different for different members of the Mirai team?)

Finally, do you notice any patterns over time? Did the motivations stay the same, or were some motivations more common early in the timeline, and other motivations become more important later on?