Update (November 5th): Information security expert Brian Krebs has suggested that this may have been an attack against a Liberian ISP, not against the whole country.
Liberia has been hit with one of the most harmful DDoS attacks yet, with most of its residents unable to get online.
It has been revealed that the cause of this is the Mirai botnet, the same system that resulted in the largest DDoS attack yet on Dyn back in October.
Mirai is especially damaging because it can attach to devices connected to the internet, including DVR players and digital cameras.
This major incident was picked up by security research Keven Beaumont, who wrote about the attack on Thursday 3rd.
Writing on Medium, Beaumont said: "The attacks are extremely worrying because they suggest a Mirai operator who has enough capacity to seriously impact systems in a nation state.”
Liberia uses one fiber cable, which made it easy for a Mirai operator to cause serious damage when attacking it, ZDNet reported.
Over the past week, Mirai botnets have been attacking the IP addresses owned by both of the Liberian companies that own the cable, which has been reported on Twitter by @MiraiAttacks.
From observing the attacks, Beaumont said: “We can see websites hosted in country going offline during the attacks .
“Additionally, a source in country at a Telco has confirmed to a journalist they are seeing intermittent internet connectivity, at times which directly match the attack”.
It seems that significant DDoS attacks are on the rise, with Mirai users demonstrating just how much damage they can do.
Just two weeks ago, domain name service Dyn was targeted by what it described as a “sophisticated attack” on October 21st.
As a result, websites such as Twitter and Spotify were slowed down, leaving users unable to access them.
