Largest Botnet Malware Highlights Need for Breach and Attack Simulation

There has been a significant increase in malicious attacks on company servers and networks this year. A report published by the Identify Theft Resource Center showed that data breaches reported in the United States from January to September 2021 have gone beyond the total number of reported breaches for the whole year of 2020. The increase has been pegged at 17 percent.

With three months left in 2021, the attacks have not slowed down. In fact, a recent incident reveals the extent of danger organizations face. Cybersecurity experts reported this month that the largest botnet that has been seen in the last six years has infected over 1.6 million different devices. The attack has been mostly concentrated in China. The ultimate goal of this particular botnet is to eventually mount distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The secondary goal was to insert advertising into HTTP websites that will be visited by users.

The botnet, which was identified by the Qihoo 360 Netlab security team, was named “Pink” because many of the function names for the bot began with the word “pink.”

The Pink botnet is the kind of malicious code that can have potentially grave effects on an organization’s network. If left undetected it could wreak serious havoc on any business. The botnet and its potential for chaos highlight the fact that continuous monitoring of the system to ensure there are no vulnerabilities is extremely important.

This highlights the need for a security method like breach and attack simulation to help in mitigating the instances of a potential attack. A computer security testing method like BAS will simulate attacks on the system without compromising the integrity and security of the network. It will mimic the potential avenues of attack on the systems and use the same techniques used by malicious actors to attack networks.

The Pink botnet method

How does the Pink botnet potentially enter systems? Its main entry points of attack are primarily MIPS-based fiber routers. It uses a mix of third-party platforms like GitHub, P2P networks, and C2 servers to attempt to control the flow of communication. The nefarious part here is that it will also try to encrypt the…