The internet of things is not that safe when it comes to protected information. Very recently, more than two million devices based on the internet of things had been infected by botnets of Mirai. This huge catastrophe occurred around the end of the fourth quarter of the previous year. In fact, the internet security company called McAfee presented a report on this particular occurrence on Tuesday. The report successfully presented a detailed report of Mirai.
What is Mirai?
Mirai has been identified as a malware device. Its main function is to turn some of the networked devices which still run on obsolete and unused versions of Linux to easily controllable bots. Thus, such bots can be controlled to produce large scale attacks on networks. The Mirai is having a wide spread effect nowadays. Very recently, the labs threats report of McAfee dated April 2017 stated that almost five devices based on the internet of things along with their IP addresses are affected by a botnet of Mirai every minute. This is an alarming figure which keeps on expanding every minute. The security industry is now facing numerous challenges while trying to share information related to intelligence threat within distinct entities as well as between solutions provided by individual vendors. Portfolios of different vendors are also under risk. The overall count of such sample malware has been growing from a figure of twenty four percent only in the year 2016 to around six hundred thirty eight million samples even though official reports show a drop of around seven percent almost in the fourth quarter of the year alone.
Recent Threats Detected
However, the malware does not simply stop at overall growth. A number of new threats have also been detected. Around one hundred and seventy six new threats have been found per minute. This has been continuing for almost every single second of the fourth quarter of the year 2016. Moreover, there has been a growth in the number of total malware that is mobile and flexible. The actual figure shows an increase of ninety nine percent in the year of 2016 alone. The total number of ransomware has been seen to have grown around eighty eight percent even with a reduction of seventy one percent in the fourth quarter of the year. Thus, it is showing alarming figures of growth at the present moment. The total number of macOS malware that are completely new also grew by two hundred and forty five percent of the original number of the fourth quarter of the year. This is a huge number but it can still be considered to be small when compared with the figures of Windows software. Overall the malware for Linux grew by seven hundred and forty four percent in the year 2016. Now a number of new updates and reports are being worked upon and published. The main aim of such work is to curb the alarming rate of growth of threatening malware that has been noticeable currently in the industry.