New Silex Malware is Bricking IoT Devices, Has Scary Plans

'A new strain of malware is wiping the firmware of IoT devices in
attacks reminiscent of the old BrickerBot malware that destroyed
millions of devices back in 2017. From a report:

Named Silex, this malware began operating earlier today, about
three-four hours before this article's publication. The malware had
bricked around 350 devices when this reporter began investigating its
operations, and the number quickly spiked to 2,000 wiped devices by
the time we published, an hour later. Attacks are still ongoing, and
according to an interview with the malware's creator, they are about
to intensify in the coming days. According to Akamai researcher Larry
Cashdollar, who first spotted the malware earlier today, Silex works
by trashing an IoT device's storage, dropping firewall rules, removing
the network configuration, and then halting the device. It's as
destructive as it can get without actually frying the IoT device's
circuits. To recover, victims must manually reinstall the device's
firmware, a task too complicated for the majority of device owners'

-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/06/25/2018218

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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