Three young men pleaded guilty to creating Mirai botnet

In the USA, three hackers pleaded guilty for creating malicious software Mirai, organizing cyber attacks with it and in some cases of online fraud and extortion. The charges are brought against Paras Jha (21 years old), Dalton Normal (also 21 years old) and Josiah White (20 years old). It was Jha with Norman’s assistance who created the source code of the malware that infected hundreds of thousands of Internet of Things devices. After that, the trio actively used infected devices united into a botnet to organize DDoS attacks and for extortion. As it turned out, their initial goal was to attack popular online game Minecraft’s servers.

In addition, Jha, Normal and White created a Clickfraud botnet that was used to redirect traffic to ad links and make money off online ads. Only from this they made about 100 Bitcoin, which is about 1.7 million dollars at the moment. It’s noteworthy that Paras Jha, Dalton Norman and Josiah White were not accused of a powerful DDoS attack that struck a large American DNS provider DYN in the end of October last year. The attack was organized using Mirai botnet and caused serious disruptions in the work of many large websites including Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, PayPal and Reddit. According to the prosecution, the attack was organized after Jha published Mirai’s code online and the creators of the malware had to connection to this attack.

As part of the plea deal, Paras Jha will give 13 Bitcoin ($226,500 at the current exchange rate) to the authorities, Josiah White will hand over another 33 Bitcoin ($571,000). The accused men face five years in prison and fines of at least $250,000. Moreover, Paras Jha might get additional 10 years in prison and another $250,000 fine for a cyber attack on Rutgers University, which he conducted without Norman or White.