Now cyber criminals are providing DDoS hire services to fellow hackers and ambitious scammers. Yes- Hackers going by the handle of Popopret and BestBuy are offering a DDoS-for-hire service where they are renting our Mirai botnet comprising of around 400,000 infected bots. It seems like they have made extensive use of the leaked source code of Mirai malware.
According to Popopret when asked about the charges for this service: Price for 50,000 bots with attack duration of 3600 secs (1 hour) and 5-10 minute cooldown time is approx 3-4k per 2 weeks.
However according to a security researchers the botnet that is up for rent now probably offers the largest collection of infected bots till date. It is also a fact that Mirai’s renting is quite expensive as interested customers are required to rent it out for at least two weeks time. The flip side is that, while renting it, customers can choose the number of bots, duration of the attack and the duration between consecutive attacks, which is called DDoS Cooldown.
It is clear that this botnet is an evolved version of the original Mirai botnet because the hackers have added additional features like SSH supported brute-force attacks to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities.