Article: The Mirai Confessions (Wired, November 2023)
The author, Andy Greenberg, describes this article as “an epic, untold, 22,000-word tale of cybercrime, friendship, chaos, betrayal, paranoia, and redemption”.
He is not wrong.
This is some fantastic reporting. It is the story of the creation of the Mirai botnet and the havoc it created by allowing massive distributed denial-of-service attacks on websites.
The audio version on the page clocks in at nearly 2 1/2 hours.
He has a history of excellent writing on computer security, having written one of my favourite books of the year “Tracers in the Dark” – the story of how American law-enforcement agencies have been able to tackle illegal activity online that is being paid for in Bitcoin.
This is an essential read.
• Wired: The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-Killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story
Spare Cycles 