‘And so this one is now replicated all over the Internet, like a little
worm of its own.’[9]
E were true, it would pale in
comparison to modern malware. Within a day of the Mirai outbreak
starting in August 2016, almost 65,000 devices had been infected. At
its peak, the resulting botnet consisted of over half a million
machines, before shrinking in size in early 2017.
Yet Mirai did share a similarity with the Morris worm, in that its
creators hadn’t expected the outbreak to get so out of hand.
Although Mirai would hit headlines when it affected websites like
Amazon and Netflix in October 2016, the botnet was initially
designed for a more niche reason. When the FBI traced its origins,
they discovered it had started with a twenty-one-year-old college
student named Paras Jha, his two friends, and the computer game
Minecraft.
Minecraft has over fifty million active users globally, who play
together in vast online worlds. The game has been hugely profitable
for its creator, who bought a $70m mansion after selling Minecraft to
Microsoft in 2014.[10] It has also been lucrative for people who run
the independent servers that host Minecraft’s different virtual
landscapes. While most online multiplayer games are controlled by a
central organisation, Minecraft operates as a free market: people can
pay to access whichever server they want. As the game became
more popular, some server owners found themselves making
hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.[11]
Given the increasing amount of money on the line, a few owners
decided to try and take out their rivals. If they could direct enough
fake activity at another server – what’s known as a ‘distributed denial
of service’ (DDoS) attack – it would slow down the connection for
anyone playing. This would frustrate users into looking for an
alternative server, ideally the one owned by the people who
organised the attack. An online arms market emerged, with
mercenaries selling increasingly sophisticated DDoS attacks, and in
many cases also selling protection against them.