Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports:
European police suspect a 29-year-old man of keeping one million people offline. They might have found the person behind the notorious hacker known as BestBuy.
At the end of last year, hackers took over hundreds of thousands of home routers using a variant of the infamous Internet of Things malware known as Mirai. Then they rented out that massive botnet so that anyone could use it to try to take down websites and servers with crippling distributed denial of service attacks, or DDoS.
That specific botnet is believed to be responsible for intermittent internet outages in the African country of Liberia, in the UK, in Germany, and for a large—but failed—cyberattack on the anti-spam organization Spamhaus.
Read more on Motherboard.
So Motherboard just jumped to the conclusion that they arrested BestBuy because he didn’t answer his email. Is this how journalism works these days? Assumptions based on the outcome you desire the most?
Well, no, I think they based the speculation on a couple of things: (1) that “BestBuy” took responsibility for the telecom attack in an interview with them, and this Brit was charged with that attack, (2) research done by a third party linking “BestBuy” to it, and then lastly, the unable to reach them via email bit. And I don’t think they declared it as a definite as much as a possibility/likelihood thing.
(Us journos sometimes defend each other. :))