Starting in September 2016, the Mirai botnet launched a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack using the Internet of Things (IoT) devices on some of the biggest websites in the world, including Reddit, Airbnb, and Netflix. Flooding the DNS provider of these websites with more than 1 TB of data per second from captured devices, the cyber attack was one of the biggest DDoS attacks ever recorded.
So, what exactly is a DDoS attack and how are IoT devices involved? The following diagram shows what a DDoS attack with IoT devices might look like:
DDoS is an attack on a website that overwhelms it with excessive traffic, causing the website to fail. This type of attack is beneficial to the website's competitors. In the case of the Mirai botnet, the attack was designed by students interested in disabling competing Minecraft servers...