While Mirai became extremely famous due to the scale of the attacks performed, multiple other independent projects existed before and after it. Some of them later incorporated pieces of Mirai's code in order to extend their functionality.
Here are some of the most notorious IoT malware families and the approximate years when they became known to the general public. All of them can be roughly split into two categories:
- The following is malware that actually aims to do harmful things:
- TheMoon (~2014): Originally propagated through vulnerabilities in Linksys routers, it later extended support to other devices, for example, ASUS through CVE-2014-9583. Started as a DDoS botnet, it was extended with new modules. For example, it recently started providing proxy functionality.
- Lightaidra (~2014): It propagates by brute forcing credentials, communicates to the C&C via IRC, and performs DDoS attacks. The source code is publicly available.
- Qbot/BASHLITE/Gafgyt...