Mirai

Overview

Mirai (Japanese for 'the future') is a revolutionary Linux-based malware family and botnet that transformed internet of things (IoT) security upon its emergence in August 2016. Authored by college students Paras Jha, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman to sabotage rival Minecraft gaming servers, Mirai targeted consumer embedded smart devices—including CCTV cameras, IP video recorders (DVRs), home routers, and network-attached storage units—running ARC, ARM, MIPS, and x86 architectures. Mirai continuously scanned IP ranges across the global IPv4 internet on TCP ports 23 and 2323, executing automated dictionary attacks against a hardcoded table of 60+ factory-default Telnet credentials (e.g., 'admin/admin', 'root/xc3511'). Once in control, the malware terminated competing malware processes, bound port 48101 to lock out rival attackers, and joined a centralized command-and-control mesh. In late 2016, Mirai orchestrated record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults exceeding 1 Terabit per second against cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs (KrebsOnSecurity), European hosting giant OVH, and managed DNS provider Dyn—crippling access to major internet platforms including Twitter, GitHub, Spotify, and Netflix across North America and Europe. In October 2016, the authors published Mirai's complete C source code on HackForums under the pseudonym 'Anna-senpai' to obscure their operational footprint. In December 2017, Jha, White, and Norman pleaded guilty in US Federal District Court to multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), cooperating with the FBI to mitigate subsequent botnets. The leaked codebase spurred dozens of mutant successor botnets, including Satori, Okiru, Mozi, and Reaper.

Known aliases

Threat reports may refer to this family under multiple names:

• Mirai
• Linux.Mirai
• Botnet.Mirai
• Worm.Mirai

Threat Actor Attribution

Attribution is probabilistic, not a science. Each link below states its confidence level and the evidence behind it.

• Paras Jha, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman (US Federal CFAA Conviction) High confidence
  Basis: Guilty pleas entered in December 2017 in US District Courts for the District of Alaska and District of New Jersey by Paras Jha, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman for creating and operating the Mirai botnet. [source]

Family Pedigree & Lineage

Malware authors regularly fork and iterate upon existing codebases. Observed upstream lineage and downstream variants for this family include:

Derived From / Upstream Ancestry: Qbot / Bashlite

Known Derivatives & Downstream Variants: Mirai V1.0 · Mirai Source Leak (Anna-Senpai) · Satori · Okiru · Mozi · Reaper (Iotroop)

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques

Observed techniques used by this family, mapped to our technical analysis hubs and the official MITRE ATT&CK framework:

Tactical Mitigations

Based on the techniques used by this family, consider the following defensive strategies:

• T1071.001: Implement web filtering and SSL/TLS inspection to detect malicious command and control (C2) traffic hiding in HTTP/HTTPS.

MITRE D3FEND™ Defensive Countermeasures

Defensive techniques mapped to counter the offensive tradecraft observed in this family (via the MITRE D3FEND matrix):

Exploited Vulnerabilities (CVEs)

This malware family is documented weaponizing the following common vulnerabilities and exposures:

• CVE-2014-8361 — In-depth exploitation analysis and catalog intelligence (NIST NVD ↗).
• CVE-2017-17215 — In-depth exploitation analysis and catalog intelligence (NIST NVD ↗).

Command & Control (C2) and Network Profile

How this family talks to its operators. C2 traffic can often identify a family even when its code and configuration are hard to analyse. Ports and patterns are historical and change between campaigns, so use them as hunting leads rather than block-only rules.

Indicators of Compromise

Public indicators drawn from CISA advisories and vendor reporting. These are historical and intended for retrospective threat hunting; current campaigns may use different infrastructure. SystemHelpDesk adheres to responsible disclosure and does not host live samples.

File hashes (SHA-256, sample)

Cryptographic hashes serve as reference indicators for triage and detection rules. In accordance with responsible threat intelligence disclosure, this catalog indexes reference metadata and does not host or distribute live malware binaries.

• e2c90c74e89bb9c07be24bc5cb808e08d660e515d9da684bc67c33190fc53cb7
• bc1d8469ad0ca93d6e5347e33526ad01c0b1a03e6834ff443a7a9fc27ec8d2a6

Delivery vectors

• Automated remote Telnet dictionary exploitation over ports 23 and 2323 against default IoT credentials
• Remote command injection into embedded web and TR-069 management interfaces (CVE-2014-8361, CVE-2017-17215)

Persistence mechanisms

• RAM-resident process execution with disk binary unlinked via unlink() after memory execution
• Binding TCP port 48101 to prevent reinfection by competing IoT botnets

Tiered Detection Rules (Cisco CAIRN Model)

Modern threat detection requires multi-layered rule engineering. We classify detections into three operational tiers based on signal fidelity:

rule MALWARE_WIN_MIRAI_T1_ARTIFACT {
    meta:
        description = "Tier 1 Primitive Artifact: Raw string matches for Mirai"
        tier = "T1 - Primitive Artifact"
        confidence = "Low-Medium (Fast Triage)"
        author = "SystemHelpdesk Threat Research Desk"
        date = "2026-10-14"
    strings:
        $s1 = "mirai" ascii wide nocase
        $s2 = "mirai" ascii wide nocase
        $s3 = "linux.mirai" ascii wide nocase
        $s4 = "botnet.mirai" ascii wide nocase
        $s5 = "worm.mirai" ascii wide nocase
    condition:
        uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and any of them
}

title: SystemHelpDesk Detection - Mirai (Botnet) Execution & Triage
id: 9979fa57-9fa9-5c4f-9171-942a6dc4eccf
status: production
description: Detects execution, defense evasion, and persistence behaviors associated
  with the Mirai malware family. Detects firewall rule subversion, internal port proxying,
  and command-and-control keepalive polling indicative of botnet nodes.
references:
- https://malware-families-catalog.systemhelpdesk.com/families/mirai
- https://malware-families-catalog.systemhelpdesk.com/defensive/botnet-protection
- https://malware-families-catalog.systemhelpdesk.com/
author: Ricky Jordan, Lead Threat Intelligence Analyst, SystemHelpDesk MSP
date: '2026-10-14'
modified: '2026-10-14'
tags:
- attack.botnet
- author.ricky-jordan
- source.systemhelpdesk-mfc
- attack.t1110_001
- attack.t1498_001
- attack.t1499_004
- attack.t1046
- attack.t1071_001
logsource:
  category: process_creation
  product: windows
detection:
  selection_process:
    Image|endswith:
    - \netsh.exe
    - \route.exe
    - \arp.exe
    - \ping.exe
    CommandLine|contains:
    - advfirewall firewall add rule
    - netsh interface portproxy
    - ping -n 1 127.0.0.1
  condition: selection_process
falsepositives:
- Legitimate enterprise administrative scripts during approved change windows
- Authorized IT software deployment utilities and backup management agents
level: high

rule MALWARE_WIN_MIRAI_T3_ATTRIBUTION {
    meta:
        description = "Tier 3 Attribution Fingerprint: Heuristic detection for Mirai tradecraft"
        tier = "T3 - Attribution Fingerprint"
        confidence = "High (Confirmed Family Signature)"
        author = "SystemHelpdesk Threat Research Desk"
        date = "2026-10-14"
    strings:
        // Core family identifier & heuristic payload signatures
        $attrib_str = "mirai" ascii wide nocase
        $pe_magic = "MZ" ascii
        $net_marker = "http" ascii nocase
    condition:
        uint16(0) == 0x5a4d and ($attrib_str and $net_marker) and filesize < 15MB
}

Containment & Response Steps

Ordered checklist for responders. Adapt to your environment and engage professional support for active incidents.

1. Isolate the host immediately to prevent Mirai from participating in coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks or scanning adjacent network segments.
2. Block outbound IRC, HTTP, or custom command protocols communicating with Mirai command-and-control servers at enterprise perimeter firewalls.
3. Disable AutoRun/AutoPlay and scan removable storage media across the enterprise if Mirai utilizes USB-based propagation vectors.
4. Eradicate rootkit drivers or scheduled task persistence mechanisms used to maintain the Mirai bot agent across reboots.

What to Avoid

Common mistakes during response to this family that can destroy evidence, spread the infection, or worsen recovery.

1. Do not assume the incident is resolved simply because an antivirus tool removed the initial Mirai dropper; always verify that secondary payloads and persistence hooks have been eradicated.
2. Avoid logging in with Domain Admin or privileged credentials on a machine suspected of running Mirai until memory triage is complete.
3. Do not delay host isolation; automated lateral movement and credential dumping can occur within minutes of initial execution.

References & External Analysis

• US DOJ Press Release - Mirai CFAA Guilty Pleas
• CISA Advisory - Understanding and Defending Against the Mirai Botnet
• NIST NVD - CVE-2014-8361
• Search "mirai" on VirusTotal (External Analysis)
• Search "mirai" on Any.Run (Sandbox Sandbox)
• Search "mirai" on MalwareBazaar (Malware Samples)

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Threats (Category: Botnet)

Explore other documented threats in the same operational category:

• Cybernetic
• Stantinko
• Tordev
• Glupteba
• Palevo
• Dorkbot
• Phorpiex
• Storm

Machine-readable

Get this profile as JSON: https://malware-families-catalog.systemhelpdesk.com/api/mirai.json

Ecosystem & Interactive Environments

This profile is part of the Malware Families Catalog, a public dataset of 2,899 malware families. The catalog is also published across our ecosystem: Hugging Face, Kaggle, Zenodo, Replit, StackBlitz, CodeSandbox, and CodePen.