Next-gen IoT botnet Hajime nearly 300K strong
The Hajime botnet is nearly 300,000 strong, making it a latent threat nearly as powerful as the notorious Mirai botnet that devastated high-profile websites last fall, leading some to think the internet had been broken.
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab lured devices infected with the Hajime worm to announce themselves to a Kaspersky honeypot, checked out whether they were actually infected and added them up. They came up with the number 297,499, says Igor Soumenkov, principal researcher at Kaspersky Lab.
An earlier estimate by Symantec put the size at tens of thousands. Estimates of the number of infected devices in Mirai botnets have put it about 400,000, but the number of devices that might be infected with the Hajime worm is 1.5 million, says Dale Drew, the CSO of Level 3, which has been building a profile of behavioral classifiers to identify it so it can be blocked.
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