Testing and Hardening IoT Devices Against the Mirai Botnet

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Presented at CyberScience2020 2020 by

Nikolaos Pitropakis

Christopher Kelly

Sean Lambrinoudakis

A large majority of cheap Internet of Things (IoT) devices that arrive brand new, and are configured without-of-the-box settings, are not being properly secured by the manufactures, and are vulnerable to existing malwarelurking on the Internet. Among them is the Mirai botnet which has had its source code leaked to the world, allowingany malicious actor to configure and unleash it. A combination of software assets not being utilised safely andeffectively are exposing consumers to a full compromise. We configured and attacked 4 different IoT devices usingthe Mirai libraries. Our experiments concluded that three out of the four devices were vulnerable to the Miraimalware and became infected when deployed using their default configuration. This demonstrates that the originalsecurity configurations are not sufficient to provide acceptable levels of protection for consumers, leaving theirdevices exposed and vulnerable. By analysing the Mirai libraries and its attack vectors, we were able to determine appropriate device configuration countermeasures to harden the devices against this botnet, which were successfullyvalidated through experimentation.