Jan 21, 2017 06:03 AM EST By Chris Brandt, UniversityHerald Reporter

Last year, the Mirai botnet attacked millions of routers causing millions of users off the Internet. Now, a security researcher declared that he could have identified one of the co-authors of the malware.

The latter part of 2016 was a time when cyber criminals launched their most dangerous and massive attack by crippling a lot of users from all over the world. The most prominent was the one that took place in the East Coast attacking the domain name system or DNS called Dyn. The result was a large distributed denial of service (DDoS), which prevented users from making their own queries and getting an answer. By attacking the DNS server, the browser is unable to use it to fetch the files of a Web page because its ability to resolve the IP address is destroyed.

Although these types of attack are not new, they can soon become a headache as more and more cyber criminals develop much stronger and more destructive malware to penetrate security.

The one that was used in the attacks last year was the malware Mirai which crept inside different devices and infected them. Once it infects the device, it becomes difficult to eliminate it. As the infection grew, it created a global network of bots that can be used for more dangerous means.

However, security researcher Brian Krebs went inside the deep recesses of the web to trace those people behind Mirai and he said that he has identified one of them. According to him, the source code for the Mirai posting can be traced to a student from Rutgers University. He said that the student did not only write the code but also used hacked devices to launch some of the attacks.

Krebs presented a lot of corroborating evidence and documented them in a lengthy post in his website. However, experts say that even if the authors of the cyber attacks are revealed, the fact remains that the botnet is already out and can be utilized anytime to launch another attack.

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