2.5 mn IoT devices infected by Mirai botnet in Q4 2016: McAfee
Number of total ransomware samples grew 88% in 2016, despite 71% drop in Q4 Two and a half million Internet of Things (IoT) devices were infected by Mirai botnet by the end of fourth quarter last year, a new report by cyber security company McAfee said on Tuesday. Mirai is a malware that turns networked devices running on obsolete versions of Linux into remotely controlled "bots" which can be used for a large-scale network attacks. The 'McAfee Labs Threats Report April 2017' estimated that five IoT device IP addresses were infected by Mirai botnet each minute. "The security industry faces critical challenges in our efforts to share threat intelligence between entities, among vendor solutions, and even within vendor portfolios," said Vincent Weafer, Vice-president McAfee Labs, in a statement. Overall count of new malware samples grew 24 per cent in 2016 to 638 million samples despite showing a drop of 17 per cent in fourth quarter. ...