Following the news that IBM has discovered the Mirai botnet deploying a bitcoin mining payload, Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst at NSFOCUS commented below.
Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst at NSFOCUS:
“Many fail to realize that botnet herders are fully capable of commanding their bots to perform all sorts of different activities. Since herders have full control over their minions via command and control (C&C) communications, instructing them to download and execute additional code to launch different types of DDoS attacks, help spread malware, and perform bitcoin mining are all achievable. Having access to large amounts of compute power and bandwidth delivered by their minions, the possibilities for hackers are nearly endless.”
