According to this article from The Register, a university network was recently brought down by what was essentially a DDoS attack from various connected devices on the network campus (specifically vending machines and the like):
A US university saw its network traffic slow to a crawl thanks to an IoT malware infection that hit, among other things, its vending machines.
The story, as told by an also unnamed senior IT staffer, goes like this: the university's network had been slowing to a crawl, prompting complaints from students. Upon investigating, the IT staff found that the school's DNS servers were buckling under heavy traffic loads.
Much of the lookup traffic (requesting seafood-related subdomains, oddly) was suspected to be from a botnet. After some investigation, the staff found that over 5,000 IoT (Internet of Things) devices around the campus – including vending machines – had been infected with malware through guessed default passwords and were being controlled remotely.
The article doesn't mention what type of malware infected the devices, although it sounds like it works quite similarly to Mirai.
Is there any evidence that shows what virus infected that university's network? Was it a known virus or does it seem like a more targeted attack?
