Dark Frost Botnet Launches Devastating DDoS Attacks on Gaming Industry

A new botnet identified as Dark Frost has been noticed launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks from the gaming market.

“The Dark Frost botnet, modeled soon after Gafgyt, QBot, Mirai, and other malware strains, has expanded to encompass hundreds of compromised devices,” Akamai security researcher Allen West mentioned in a new complex analysis shared with The Hacker News.

Targets contain gaming organizations, video game server hosting

providers, on the net streamers, and even other gaming neighborhood members with whom the threat actor has interacted straight.

As of February 2023, the botnet contains 414 equipment running several instruction set architectures these kinds of as ARMv4, x86, MIPSEL, MIPS, and ARM7.

Botnets are usually manufactured up of a extensive network of compromised units close to the globe. The operators tend to use the enslaved hosts to mine cryptocurrency, steal sensitive facts, or harness the collective internet bandwidth from these bots to knock down other websites and internet servers by flooding the targets with junk traffic.

Dark Frost represents the most recent iteration of a botnet that appears to have been stitched with each other by thieving resource code from many botnet malware strains these kinds of as Mirai, Gafgyt, and QBot.

Akamai, which reverse-engineered the botnet after flagging it on February 28, 2023, pegged its attack potential at somewhere around 629.28 Gbps through a UDP flood attack. The danger actor is considered to be active considering the fact that at least May well 2022.

“What tends to make this particular scenario fascinating is that the actor powering these attacks has printed dwell recordings of their attacks for all to see,” the web infrastructure company reported.

“The actor was noticed boasting about their achievements on social media, employing the botnet for petty on-line disputes, and even leaving electronic signatures on their binary file.”

Impending WEBINARZero Believe in + Deception: Understand How to Outsmart Attackers!

Explore how Deception can detect advanced threats, halt lateral motion, and boost your Zero Have faith in approach. Be a part of our insightful webinar!

Save My Seat!

The adversary has more set up a Discord channel to aid attacks in exchange for revenue, indicating their financial motivations and plans to flesh it out as a DDoS-for-employ provider.

Dark Frost constitutes a fashionable instance of how effortless it is for newbie cybercriminals with rudimentary coding competencies to spring into motion employing by now offered malware to inflict substantial problems on enterprises.

“The reach that these menace actors can have is staggering inspite of the absence of novelty in their approaches,” West reported. “Though not the most superior or thoughts-bending adversary, the Dark Frost botnet has nonetheless managed to accumulate hundreds of compromised products to do its bidding.”

Discovered this article fascinating? Stick to us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read additional exceptional content we publish.

Some pieces of this post are sourced from:
thehackernews.com