The DDoS attacks come from the same malware responsible for last month's disruptions in the US The malware behind last month’s massive internet disruption in the U.S. is targeting Liberia with financially devastating results.This week, a botnet powered by the Mirai malware has been launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on IP addresses in the African country, according to security researchers. These attacks are the same kind that briefly disrupted internet access across the U.S. almost two weeks ago. They work by flooding internet connections with too much traffic, effectively forcing the services offline.On Thursday, an employee with one Liberian mobile service provider said the attacks were taking a toll. “The DDoS is killing our business,” he said over the phone. “We have a challenge with the DDoS. We are hoping someone can stop it.”The employee declined to have his name published because he was not authorized to speak for his company. The attacks began a few days ago, he said, but not all Liberian internet providers were affected. “It’s killing our revenue. Our business has been targeted frequently,” he said.The attack on Liberia was noticed by security researcher Kevin Beaumont, who on Thursday wrote a post about the Mirai-powered botnet responsible.This particular Mirai botnet is able to generate more than 500 Gbps of traffic, enough to seriously disrupt systems across Liberia, which already has limited internet infrastructure, he said.“From monitoring, we can see websites hosted in country going offline during the attacks,” Beaumont added. Hackers have been creating botnets with the Mirai malware ever since its anonymous creator released the source code on a forum in late September. About 500,000 poorly secured internet devices, including surveillance cameras and DVRs, are estimated to be infected with Mirai. Last month’s DDoS attack in the U.S. came from 100,000 infected devices, according to DNS service provider Dyn. In addition, variants of the malware have been appearing. It’s still unclear who is behind these DDoS attacks, but security researchers speculate they may be coming from amateur hackers running DDoS-for-hire services. These services can be bought for a fee to attack targets, such as a video game or website, for extortion purposes.In the case of Liberia, the attacks could be hackers wanting to try out new denial-of-service techniques, Beaumont said. Related content news Is China waging a cyber war with Taiwan? Nation-state hacking groups based in China have sharply ramped up cyberattacks against Taiwan this year, according to multiple reports. By Gagandeep Kaur Dec 01, 2023 4 mins Cyberattacks Government news Apple patches info-stealing, zero day bugs in iPads and Macs The vulnerabilities that can allow the leaking of sensitive information and enable arbitrary code execution have had exploitations in the wild. By Shweta Sharma Dec 01, 2023 3 mins Zero-day vulnerability feature The CSO guide to top security conferences Tracking postponements, cancellations, and conferences gone virtual — CSO Online’s calendar of upcoming security conferences makes it easy to find the events that matter the most to you. By CSO Staff Dec 01, 2023 6 mins Technology Industry IT Skills Events news Conti-linked ransomware takes in $107 million in ransoms: Report A ransomware campaign linked to the ostensibly defunct Conti malware group has targeted mostly US businesses, in a costly series of attacks. By Jon Gold Nov 30, 2023 4 mins Ransomware Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe